THE CHARLES DICKENS ORIGINALS 




CHARLES DICKENS 
15y Daniel Madise, R.A. 



THE CHARLES 

DICKENS 
ORIGINALS 

BY EDWIN PUGH 

AUTHOR OF "CHARLES DICKENS 
THE APOSTLE OF THE PEOPLE" 

Book 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153 FIFTH AVEXUE 

1912 






Published November igi2 



1 






Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson <&* Co. 
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 



PREFACE 

I AM glad of this opportunity to offer my sincere 
thanks to all those who have so kindly and cour- 
teously assisted me in the making of this book : 
to my friend, Mr. Nat Simmonds, to Sir Melville 
Macnaghten, C.B.,The Assistant Commissioner 
of Police, to the Rev. Hume Elliot, The Biblio- 
phile Society of Boston, U.S.A., Mr. Arthur 
Humphreys, Switzerland, to Messrs. Atwood & 
Sons, and especially to the members of the Dick- 
ens family, Henry Fielding Dickens, Esq., K.C., 
Mrs. Perugini, and Miss Georgina Hogarth. I 
am also deeply indebted to Mr. B. W. Matz for 
the care and pains he has taken in revising the 
proofs of this book. 

E. P. 

St. Ellar's, Harrow Weald. 
October 191 2. 



THE LIST OF CHAPTERS 

I. The Immortal Child pack i 

II. Of Two Women : I. Maria Beadnell ... 21 

III. Of Two Women : II. Mary Hogarth .... 57 

IV. Some Pickwickians 81 

V. About Squeers and Mr. Fang 99 

VI. The Brothers Cheeryble and others . . .121 

VII. Relics from the Old Curiosity Shop . • . 145 

VIII. Family Portraits 165 

IX. Of Adventures IN History 197 

X. Criminal Prototypes 235 

XI. The Great Grotesques 265 

XII. Minor Characters 285 

XIII. Some Dickens' Contemporaries 311 

XIV. Dickens Himself 331 

Index 341 



THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Charles Dickens Frontispiece J 

By Daniel Maclise, R.A. 

Charles Dickens page 8 / 

Silhouette by permission of the Connoisseur, 

Leigh Hunt 16/ 

Engraved by H. Meyer from a drawing by J. Wayter. 

Walter Savage Landor 24 / 

The original of Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House, 

Maria Beadnell 40 / 

Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliophile Society, 
Boston, U.S.A. 

Mary Hogarth 56^/ 

By H. K. Brown. By permission of Miss Georgina 
Hogarth. 

Henry Burnett, Brother-in-Law of Charles Dickens 72 / 
The original of Nicholas Nickleby. 

Judge L. Gazalee 80/ 

Sam Vale 88 '^ 

The original of Sam Weller. 

The Honourable Miss Monckton, afterwards Lady Cook 96/ 
Mezzotint by J. Jacobs after Reynolds. The original of 
Mrs. Leo Hunter in Pickwick. 

Serjeant Bompas 104 / 

The original of Serjeant Buzfuz. 

The Right Honourable Lord Brougham . . . .112/ 
Engraved by D. J. Pound from a photograph by Mayall. 

William Grant 128"^ 

Daniel Grant 136 ^ 



THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

John Dickens page 144 ^ 

By John W. Gilbert. By permission of N. P. Dickens, 
K.C. 

Mrs. Cooper (Little Dorrit) 152 > 

•'The Duet" 168 / 

Picture by Frank Stone, father of Marcus Stone, R.A. 
Introducing Tennyson resting chin in hand gazing 
at performers, with Dickens in foreground. Miss Ho- 
garth is one of the figures at the piano. 

Mrs. John Dickens 184 / 

By John W. Gilbert. By permission of N. P. Dickens, 
K.C. 

The Children of Charles Dickens with Grip the Raven 200/* 
From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. By permis- 
sion of Miss Perugini. 

Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield . . 216 y 

Lord Mansfield 224 

Lord George Gordon 232 

Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall) , . . 248/ 

Lord Grenville 256 

Samuel Carter Hall 264 

Sir Robert Peel 272 

Mrs. Hayes (Polly Toddle) ^80^ 

Inspector Field 296, ' 

The original of Inspector Buckett. 

Judge Talfourd 312 

John Forster 328 

By C B. Perugini. Bequeathed by Mrs. John Forster 
to the Victoria and Albert Museum. 



CHAPTER ONE 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 



CHARLES DICKENS ORIGINALS 
CHAPTER ONE 

THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

THERE ARE MANY PORTRAITS OF 
Charles Dickens ; but that portrait which photo- 
graphy has made most familiar to the world is 
perhaps the least expressive of his personality. 
It shows him as a worn and haggard man, with 
scanty grizzled locks, and a deeply-lined face. It 
is the portrait of a man prematurely old and wise 
and tired. It as little reflects the character of the 
author oi Pickwick and all that magnificent sequ- 
ence of books which culminated in DavidCopper- 
field,diS the bald head and fat flaccid face of Shak- 
espeare — the faceof one enjoyinga sleek, prosper- 
ous, and smug middle-age — reflects thecharacter 
of the author oi Romeo and Juliet, or A Midsum- 
mer Night' s Dream. 

But you will observe here certain reservations. 
It is not suggested that this portraitof Dickens at 
fifty does not look like the portrait of the author 
of Bleak House or Hard Times or Little Dorrit. 
And the original of that bourgeois Shakespeare 
of the Stratford-on-Avon bust might quite con- 
ceivably have written The Tetnpest or King Lear 
or Coriolanus. We have only a feeling of vague 
disillusion when we try to realise that men of such 
a commonplace exterior were the mighty genius- 
es who have created a new world for us. 

And here, I think, our instinct is right. These 
3 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

bored-looking, sophisticated men of affairs are not 
the men who penned those flaming masterpieces 
which have so stirred and thrilled us. These men 
are as the shrivelled husks of that immortal shin- 
ing soul whichonce irradiated the beautiful bloomy 
flesh and fired the rich red blood of appropriate 
youth. There was a time when the treasures that 
these god-like beings — by nature divine, human 
only by grace — poured forth in such rare abund- 
ance, were as diamonds flashing on the fair skin 
of a young girl's delicate bosom ; now they are 
as pearls concealed in the craggy rugged oyster- 
shell. 

Dickens himself was acutely, whimsically con- 
scious of this sad difference between the Ideal and 
the Real which does so plague and vex the inveter- 
ate hero-worshipper. Whilst on a visit to Edin- 
burgh he wrote : 

" Walking up and down the hall of the courts 
of law (which was full of advocates, writers to 
the signet, clerks, and idlers) was a tall, burly, 
handsome man of eight and fifty, with a gait like 
0'Conneirs,the bluest eyes you can imagine, and 
long hair — longer than mine — falling down in a 
wildwayunder the broad brimof his hat. He had 
on a surtout coat, a blue checked shirt ; the collar 
standing up and kept in its place with a wisp of 
black neckerchief ; no waistcoat, and a large poc- 
ket-handkerchief thrust into his breast, which was 
all broad and open. At his heels followed a wiry, 

4 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

sharp-eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his 
steps as he went slashing up and down, now with 
one man beside him, now with another, and now 
quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace, with 
his head in the air,and his eyes as wide open as he 
could get them. I guessed it was Wilson, and it 
was. A bright, clear-complexioned, mountain- 
looking fellow, helooks as though he had just come 
down from the Highlands, and had never in his 
life taken pen inhand. But he has had an attack of 
paralysis in his right arm within this month. He 
winced when I shook hands with him, and once or 
twice when we were walking up and down slipped 
as if he had stumbled on a piece of orange-peel. 
He is a great fellow to look at, and to talk to ; and, 
if you could divest your mind of the actual Scott, 
is just the figure you would put in his place." 

And,echoing Dickens, theportrait that I would 
put in the place of that well-known latter-day 
photograph is the portrait of himself at twenty- 
seven, painted byMaclise : a portrait that justifies 
Mrs. Carlyle in saying that hisface was as if made 
of steel. 

More soberly Forster describes him as one 
whose " look of youthfulness first attracted you, 
and then a candour and openness of expression 
which made you sure of the qualities within. The 
features were very good. He had a capital fore- 
head ; a firm nose, with full, wide nostril ; eyes 
wonderfully beaming with intellect, and running 
5 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

over with humour and cheerfulness; and a rather 
prominent mouth, strongly marked with sensi- 
bility. The head was altogether well-formed and 
symmetrical, and the air and carriage of it were 
extremely spirited. The hair . . . was then of a 
rich brown and most luxuriant abundance, and 
the face . . . had hardly a vestige of hair or 
whisker ; but there was that in the face as I first 
recollect it which no time could change, and which 
remained implanted on it unalterably to the last. 
This was the quickness, keenness, and practical 
power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on 
each several feature, that seemed to tell so little 
of a student or writer of books, and so much of 
a man of action and business in the world. Light 
and motion flashed from every part of it. . . . 
' What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room ! ' 
wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the morning after I had 
made them known to each other. ' It has the 
life and soul in it of fifty human beings.' In such 
sayings are expressed not alone the restless and 
resistless vivacity and force of which I have 
spoken, but that also which lay beneath them, of 
steadiness and hard endurance." 

Yes, that was indeed the typeof face which one 
would associate with all, except perhaps three or 
four, of the Dickens books. But it was not the 
face of the man who wrote in the preface to his 
next book after David Copperfield, when his high 
spirits had begun to flag and the fount of his 

6 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

inspiration to bubble up a little less freely and 
brightly: ''In Bleak Housel have purposely dwelt 
upon the romantic side of familiar things. " 1 1 had 
never before been necessary for him to dwell, of 
deliberate set purpose, upon any particular aspect 
of life. All aspects of life had been alike gilded 
and glorified by the ruddy glow of his radiant fancy. 
Even the essential repulsiveness of such human 
monsters as Fagin,Squeers, Quilp, Sampson and 
Sally Brass, Pecksniff, Carker, and Uriah Heep, 
had been veiled and tempered by the merry gleam 
and twinkle of his indomitable humour that played 
about their hideousness like summer lightning. 
There is romance and to spare in Bleak House ; 
but it is dingy and grotesque romance. Even the 
boisterous fierce sweetness and gentleness of 
Boythorn seems to lack something of convic- 
tion : it is a little hard and flat ; whilst the sly, self- 
seeking dilettantism of Skimpole is as differ- 
ent from the reckless florid Bohemianism of Mic- 
awber as the acrid taste of Marah-water is differ- 
ent from the mellow flavour of the famous bowl 
of punch. It was Dickens' consciousness of a de- 
cline in power which impelled him to insist upon 
that note in his work which had hitherto been its 
chief distinguishing note. 

And the chief distinguishing note of Dickens' 
work, until the hour of his apogee, was clear and 
bell-like as the laughter of a child. Dickens was 
7 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the immortal boy whom Mr. Barrie has redis- 
covered in Peter Pan. Perhaps it was because 
Dickens' best childhood had not happened to 
him in his earliest years that he remained a child 
so long and indeed never grew up altogether. 
Writing in 1853 in the editorial plural he says : 
" We have never grown the thousandth part 
of an inch out of Robinson Crusoe. He fits us just 
as well, and in exactly the same way, as when 
we were among the smallest of the small. We 
have never grown out of his parrot or his dog, 
or his fowling-piece, or the horrible old staring 
goat he came upon in the cave, or his rusty money, 
or his cap, or umbrella. There has been no change 
in the manufacture of telescopes, since that blessed 
ship's spy-glass was made, through which, lying 
on his breast at the top of his fortification, with 
the ladder drawn up after him and all made safe, 
he saw the black figures of those cannibals mov- 
ing round the fire on the sea-sand, as themonsters 
danced themselves into an appetite for dinner. 
We have never grown out of Friday, or the excel- 
lent old father he was so glad to see, or the grave 
and gentlemanly Spaniard, or the reprobate Will 
Atkins, or the knowingway in which he and those 
other mutineers were lured up into the Island 
when they came ashore there and their boat was 
stove. We have got no nearer heaven by the 
altitude of an atom, in respect of the tragi-comic 
bear whom Friday caused to dance upon a tree, 

8 




CHARLES DICKENS 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

or the awful array of howling wolves in the dismal 
weather, who were mad to make good entertain- 
ment of man and beast, and who were received 
with trains of gunpowder laid on fallen trees, and 
fired by the snappingof pistols; and who ran blaz- 
ing into the forest darkness, or were blown up 
famously. Never sail we, idle, in a little boat, and 
hear the rippling water at the prow, and look 
upon the land, but we know that our boat-growth 
stopped for ever, when Robinson Crusoe sailed 
round the Island, and, having been nearly lost, 
was so affectionatelyawakened out of his sleep at 
home again by that immortal parrot, great pro- 
genitor of all the parrots we have ever known. . . . 
" We have never grown out of the real original 
roaring giants. We have seen modern giants, 
for various considerations ranging from a penny 
to half-a-crown ; but, they have only had a head 
apiece, and have been merely large men, and 
not always that. We have never outgrown the 
putting to ourselves of this supposititious case : 
Whether, if we, with a large company of brothers 
and sisters, had been put in his (by which we 
mean, of course, in Jack's) trying situation, we 
should have had at once the courage and the pre- 
sence of mind to take the golden crowns (which 
it seems they always wore as night-caps) off the 
heads of the giant's childrenas they lay a- bed, and 
put them on our family ; thus causingour treacher- 
ous host to batter his own offspring and spare us. 
9 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

We have never outgrown a want of confidence 
in ourselves, in this particular. . . . 

" We have never outgrown the whole region 
of Covent Garden. We preserve it as afine, dissi- 
pated, insoluble mystery. We believe that the 
gentleman mentioned in Colman's Broad Grins 
still lives in King Street. We have a general idea 
that the passages at the Old Hummums lead to 
groves of gorgeous bedrooms, eating out the 
whole of the adjacent houses : where Chamber- 
lains who have never been in bed themselves for 
fifty years, show any country gentleman who 
rings at the bell, at any hour of the night, to luxu- 
rious repose in palatial apartments fitted up after 
the Eastern manner. (We have slept there in 
our time, but that makes no difference.) There is 
a fine secrecy and mystery about the Piazza ; — 
how you get up to those rooms above it, and what 
reckless deeds are done there. (We know some 
of these apartments very well, but that does not 
signify in the least.) We have not outgrown the 
two great Theatres. Ghosts of great names are 
always getting up the most extraordinary panto- 
mimes in them, with scenery and machinery on a 
tremendous scale. We have no doubt that the 
critics sit in the pit of both houses, every night. 
Even as we write in our commonplace ofifice, we 
behold from the window, four young ladies with 
peculiarly limp bonnets, and of a yellow or drab 
style of beauty, making for the stage-door of the 

lO 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

Lyceum Theatre, in the dirty little fog-choked 
street over the way. Grown-up wisdom whispers 
that these are beautiful fairies by night, and that 
they will find Fairyland dirty even to their 
splashed skirts, and rather cold and dull (not- 
withstanding its mixed gas and daylight), this 
easterly morning. But, we don't believe it. 

"... We have never outgrown the rugged 
walls of Newgate, or any other prison on the out- 
side. All within is still the same blank of remorse 
and misery. We have never outgrown Baron 
Trenck. Among foreign fortifications, trenches, 
counterscarps, bastions, sentries, and what not, 
we always have him, filing at his chains down in 
some arched darkness far below, or taming the 
spiders to keep him company. We have never 
outgrown the wicked old Bastille. Here, in our 
mind at this present childish moment, is a distinct 
ground-plan (wholly imaginative and resting on 
no kindofauthority),ofamazeof low-vaulted pass- 
ages with small black doors ; and here, inside of 
this remote door on the left, where the black cob- 
webs hang likeaveilfromthearch, and the jailer's 
lamp will scarcely burn, was shut up, in black 
silence through so many years, that old man of the 
affecting anecdote, who was at last set free. But, 
who brought his white face, and his white hair, and 
his phantom figure, back again, to tell them what 
they had made him — how he had no wife, no 
child, no friend, no recognition of the light and 
1 1 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

air — and prayed to be shut up in his old dungeon 
till he died. 

" We received our earliest and most enduring 
impressions among barracks and soldiers, and 
ships and sailors. We have outgrown no story of 
voyage and travel, no love of adventure, no ardent 
interest in voyagers and travellers. We have out- 
grown no country inn — roadside, in the market- 
place, or on a solitary heath; no country land- 
scape, no windy hillside, no old manor-house, no 
haunted place of any degree, not a drop in the 
sounding sea. Though we are equal (on strong 
provocation) to the Lancers, and may be heard 
of in the Polka, we have not outgrown Sir Roger 
de Coverley, or any country dance in the music- 
book. We hope we have not outgrown the capa- 
city of being easily pleased with what is meant to 
please us, or the simple folly of being gay upon 
occasion without the leastregard to being grand." 

There speaks the immortal child : the boy who 
never grew up . . . until, as we shall see, he met 
with his first great disillusion. 

We average folk view the world with the eyes 
of use and wont. We see things as we expect 
or desire or have been taught to see them. Our 
vision is clouded by mists of prepossession or pre- 
judice; it is distorted by some moral or mental bias 
that causes us tosquint and blink at the facts of life 
instead of looking them fairly and squarely in the 

t2 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

face. As little children we lived in a new amazing 
world, staring with grave curiosity at all the queer 
objects that surrounded us, wondering what they 
all meant, forming our own ideas about them, and 
givingforth our judgments in regard to them with 
that simple directness which is at once so scath- 
ing and so apposite. It is out of the mouths of 
babes and sucklings (in the Biblical phrase) that 
praise is indeed perfected. For children praise 
only that which is good in their eyes, and not, 
as men do, that which they think they ought to 
praise. And as in approval so in condemnation : 
the criticisms of children are always at least 
honest. They do not admire a picture because 
it bears a famous name, but because its colour or 
its subject appeals to their unsophisticated taste. 
They will only consent to be nursed by Uncle 
Midas because he tips them shillings, and not 
even his shillings can bribe them to silence on the 
subject of his funny nose. They go about asking 
all manner of questions about all manner of things 
in a most disconcertingway. And they are not to 
be put off or turned aside by any equivocations. 
It is not enough to tell them that certain things 
have always been so, they want to know why they 
havealways been so, why people have put up with 
them so long, and why they cannot be altered. 

In this they are extraordinarily like Charles 
Dickens. 

And they are like Charles Dickens in their 
13 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

acute perception of the grotesque and the humor- 
ous, the hideous and the fantastic, aspects of life. 
They believe in devils and fairies, ghosts and 
bogeys, as he did. They have in excess the ele- 
mental twin senses of horror and fun that cause 
them to scream in the dark at the figments of 
their own imagination, and to laugh at the spec- 
tacle of a fat pompous old gentleman who has 
tripped on a piece of orange peel and fallen in the 
mud. It does not matter to them that the dream 
which frightened them is so improbable as to be 
merely absurd : one thinks of the Spontaneous 
Combustion of Krook in this connection. Nor 
does it matter to them that the fat pompous old 
gentleman is, say, the Lord High Chancellor, or 
a bishop, or the Prime Minister, or even a king. 
They do not understand social values. They do 
not see why, because an undersized, coarse, puny, 
stupid old gentleman, or an idle, vain, insipid, 
selfish ladyhasmoneyorrank, he or she should be 
served and waited on and bowed down to by big, 
fine, strong, clever men, or hard-working, gentle, 
loving, lovable, and unselfish women. They can- 
not grasp the significance of that parental decree 
which ordainsthat they may play only with certain 
stiff, starchy children whom they detest, instead 
of with far jollier, dirtier, noisier children whom 
they consider charming. And they flatly refuse 
to believe that cookie who makes such delicious 
confections, and Annie the housemaid who knows 

14 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

such heaps on heaps of nursery rhymes, and Or- 
son the groom who can whistle through his fingers, 
are not more wonderful and admirable persons 
than Aunt Alicia and Lady Disdain and the Hon- 
orable Archie Purdew. In these particulars also 
they are very like Dickens; or, one should rather 
say, he is very like them. 

It is sometimes urged against Dickens that he 
labelled his characters, and from start to finish 
forced them to live up to their label. I think it 
would be truer to say that it is we, the average 
folk, who label our friends and acquaintances and 
neighbours, and refuse to believe in anything 
about them that seems to contradict the label. 
We take people for granted. Dickens did not. 
He looked at people, as children do, with ever 
fresh frank interest ; and he saw that they were, 
all of them, really very funny, or very pathetic, or 
very good, or very bad. He seized on theirsalient 
peculiarities, and by a sort of sublime logic de- 
duced the whole man from the cast and texture 
of his face, the colour of his hair or eyes, the cut 
of his clothes, his idiosyncracies of manner or 
speech, and the general effect of his personality. 

He did believe that that outward seeming 
reflected the inner spirit. "There is (he says) no- 
thing truer than physiognomy, taken in connec- 
tion with manner. The art of reading that book 
of which Eternal Wisdom obliges every human 
creature to present his or her own page with the 
15 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

individual character written on it, is a difficult one, 
perhaps, and is little studied. Itmayrequire some 
natural aptitude, and it must require (for every- 
thing does) some patience and some pains. That 
these are not usually given to it, that numbers 
of people accept a few stock commonplace ex- 
pressions of the face as the whole list of charac- 
teristics, and neither seek nor know the refine- 
ments that are truest, that You, for instance, give 
a great deal of time and attention to the reading 
of music, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, 
if you please, and do not qualify yourself to read 
the face of the master or mistress looking over 
your shoulder teaching it to you, I assume to be 
five hundred times more probable than improb- 
able. Perhaps a little self-sufficiency may be at 
the bottom of this ; facial study requires no study 
from you, you think ; it comes by nature to you 
to know enough about it, and you are not to be 
taken in. I confess, for my part, that I have been 
taken in, over and over again. I have been taken 
in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of 
course) by friends ; far oftener by friends than by 
any other class of persons. How came I to be so 
deceived ? Had I quite misread their faces? No. 
Believe me, my first impression of those people, 
founded on face and manner alone, was invari- 
ably true. My mistake was in suffering them to 
come nearer to me and explain themselves away." 
In this sense, then, Dickens drew from life as 

i6 




LEIGH HUNT 
"Skimpole" 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

the painter draws from the model. But it is a 
poor painter who paints only portraits of models. 
The true creative artist inevitably and invariably 
endows all his subjects with some vague elusive 
quality of his own genius which uplifts them from 
thecommonplace, transfigures and glorifies them. 
He paints not individuals but types. He shows 
us men and women, scenes and incidents, which 
suggest to us men and women we have known, 
scenes and incidents we have ourselves beheld or 
taken part in. He shows us old familiar things in 
a new unfamiliar light, and so reveals their inner 
meaning to us. It may be that hitherto these 
things have seemed to bear no definite signifi- 
cance; but never again shall we see them, or ex- 
perience them, or remember them, or come into 
close contact with them, withoutfeeling that they 
have in some mysterious way been invested with 
a new poignant interest. In short, the artist has 
opened our eyes to the truth. And this is the 
daily miracle of art : making the blind to see. 

It was a miracle that only Dickens, after Shak- 
espeare, was able to perform with consistent suc- 
cess. We have grown so used to Shakespeare's 
people that we never think of them'as caricatures. 
We accept them as universal types. Yet they are, 
in numberless instances, quite as grotesque, quite 
as highly coloured, and quite as improbable — to 
the average purblind intelligence — as Dickens' 
people. Set Malvolio against Pecksniff, or Fal- 
17 B 



f 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

staff against Micawber — to choose two rough-and- 
ready examples — and you will see that they are 
all four alike incredible and yet living figures. 

The truth is, of course, that whole masses of 
people approximate more or less to one type, and 
that to express that type the artist must sum up 
all the variations from it in one colossal archetype. 
In this way, and in this way only, is it possible to 
create characters that shall become immortal. 
(Sherlock Holmes, alone among modern crea- 
tions, is likeliest to become immortal, and for this 
reason.) For we are, most of us, so much alike 
we differ so little from others of our own kidney 
that it would be possible to marshal a successior 
of individuals who, beginningwithQuiIp,evolvec 
by infinitesimal gradations, into the saintly, pre- 
posterous Tom Pinch. The two extremes of tha 
line are in such violent contrast as to seem irre-f 
concilable with the fact of their common human 
nature ; and yet at no point in the line could you 
point to any member of that close-packed pha-i 
lanx and say : " It is here that one type ceases ancf 
another type comes into being." But you could 
set Dickens' characters in a row and say just that. 
You can quite easily perceive the difference be- 
tween Skimpole and Micawber, or Sam Weller 
and Mark Tapley. And it is precisely because 
of this stark rawness in depiction that Dickens' 
people, by virtue of their very eccentricity, live. 

But apologists of Dickens, jealous for his re- 



THE IMMORTAL CHILD 

putation, have been at considerable pains — un- 
necessary pains, perhaps — to prove that many 
of his characters had actual prototypes ; that the 
originals of Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber 
were Dickens' own mother and father; that Skim- 
pole and Boythorn were recognisable caricatures 
of Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor, and 
so on. And even to-day there are certain obscure 
Dickens-lovers who will tell you with obvious 
conviction that they have met and talked to 
people who might have sat to Dickens as models 
for the Artful Dodger or Young Mr. Chivery : 
which seems quite likely, but which proves no- 
thing, since the merit of Dickens' creations lies, 
not in their fidelity to any individual, but in their 
approximation to type. 

In the case of Dickens, as in the case of Scott, 
it is safe to say, as Mr. W. S. Crockett has said 
in a previous volume in this series, that "the 
whole question is a somewhat thorny one ; " that 
Dickens, like Scott, had often " an individual in 
view, no doubt, but his identity was veiled by the 
addition of characteristics belonging to a total- 
ly different personage or (as often happened) 
personages " ; that Dickens, like Scott, " paint- 
ed in ' composites.' The living person he never 
transferred to his pages simply as he was. That 
were a violation of the technique of the novelist's 
art, impossible to a great creative genius ; " that 
Dickens' characters were like Scott's, " his own 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

matchless creation. He first lived among them^ 
He had gone through the length and breadth o^ 
the country and had met after a friendly fashion 
with all the conditions of life which are so happily 
reflected in his resplendent mirror. That every- 
thing is so real, so true tolife, soexquisitely touch- 
ed with the * rare sweet glamour of humanity.' " 

But that Dickens was deeply influenced by 
certain persons with whom he had been on terms 
of intimacy in his earlier days, that his outlook 
upon life was affected by his feelings toward 
those persons, and that, finally, he did use and 
exploit the superficial mannerisms of some of 
his acquaintances and friends, is, I think, demons- 
trably true. At any rate, it is the purpose of this 
book to establish that theory. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND 

OF TWO WOMEN : I. MARIA 
BEADNELL 



CHAPTER THE SECOND OF 

TWO WOMEN : I. MARIA BEADNELL 

THERE ARE SOME JOLTERHEADS 
who hold that Realism and Idealism are as the 
poles asunder; that no Realist can be an Idealist; 
that every Realist is of necessity a Pessimist and 
every Idealist a heaven-born Optimist ; that the 
Real is always depressing and unlovely and the 
Ideal always exhilarating and visionary. As if 
there were not such real things in the world as 
mother-love and moonshine, sunshine and the 
way of a man with a maid, art and music, the call 
of the sea, friendship, heroism, faith, hope and 
charity ! Dickens was at once a Realist and an 
Idealist. He only differed from some English dis- 
ciples of the French Naturalistic School of Fic- 
tion in that whilst they seem to prefer to stoop 
and sniff and examine the manure at the root of 
the tree he preferred to stand erect and rejoice in 
the beauty and inhale the perfume of the rose. 

There are no villains more villainous than his ; 
yet even to Quilp he gives a sense of humour ; 
and I have always felt that Bill Sikes could not 
have been wholly bad, or he would not have kept 
a dog, and that he must have had his rare moments 
of tenderness (of which, no doubt, he was heartily 
ashamed) or Nancy would not have loved him so. 
Dickens onlyfailed as a Realist when his sense of 
humour failed, as it did sometimes — in the ardour 
of propaganda, in the lame conclusions of most of 
23 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

his novels, and in his depiction of some of his 
heroes and heroines. Harry and Rose Maylie 
Nicholas Nickleby and Madeline Bray, Edward 
Chester and Emma Haredale, Walter Gay and 
Florence Dombey : these are all lay figures, 
mere walking gentlemen and leading ladies of 
melodrama, the conventional dummies of tradi- 
tion, conventionally fine, conventionally beauti- 
ful, conventionally eloquent, and — like most con- 
ventions — utterly unconvincing. Theymoveam- 
ong the other characters, all vital and arrestive, 
like grey shadows. They are indeed the shadows 
of a dream : a dream that Dickens implicitly 
believed in : a dream that was to him no dream 
but a reality. 

Dickens was a man of few illusions : therein 
lay the strength of his realism ; but such illusions 
as he had he clung to with the tenacity of a child : 
and therein lay the weakness of his idealism. He 
clung to the illusion that there did exist in the 
world women who were, humanly speaking, per- 
fect./ He was firmly convinced that he had met 
at least one, and perhaps two such women in his 
youth. And out of thisconvictiongrew his almost 
pathetic faith in the idea that somewhere, in some 
undiscovered corner of the earth, there might be 
a perfect man also. ** At least," he seems to have 
said to himself, " I will give mankind the benefit 
of the doubt. It can at any rate do no harm to 
assume the existence of my ideal. There were 

24 




WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
"Boythorn" 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

great men before Agamemnon ; there may have 
been good men since Christ." That was in the 
first flush of his manhood. 

But presently, as his circle of acquaintance 
widened, as his field of observation was enlarged, 
as his knowledge of human nature increased, and 
still his ideal man refused to materialise, his faith 
in that glorious figment began to droop and lan- 
guish. After Edward Chester, who hardly con- 
trives to breathe, there is only Walter Gay — 
and he was meant to be somebody else. Thence- 
forth, from the birth of Martin Chuzzlewit to the 
supposed death of John Harmonon thecoldslimy 
stones of the riverside causeway, we have only the 
most fleeting glimpses of this ideal man. Itis true 
that he flickers up into a feeble semblance of life 
in the resurrection of John Rokesmith, but only 
to be ruthlessly murdered as Edwin Drood. So 
he died and was buried. But one of Dickens' 
ideal women, though she died — died without 
ever having lived — was never buried. The other 
ideal woman had the misfortune to descend from 
heaven to earth ; and, meeting her old admirer for 
the first time in the flesh, was at one stroke made 
both mortal and immortal by his genius. 

i 

Her name was Maria Beadnell, and she was 
a very real person indeed. Her father, George 
Beadnell, had two other daughters, Margaret 
and Anne. He was one of two brothers, the other 

25 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

named John. They were bankers who, in 1830, 
lived and carried on their trade at No. 2 Lombard 
Street. 

I have a fancy, based on a pretty extensive 
knowledge of Dickens' well-known passion for 
authenticity in the matter of backgrounds and his 
meticulous methods in describing them, that this 
old-fashioned business house figures, in regard to 
the official part of it, as Tellson's Bank in A Tale 
of Two Cities, and also, in regard to its domestic 
side, as the Aladdin's palaceoccupiedforonenight 
only by Ralph Nickleby. It is true thatneither of 
these interiors belongs to the locality of Lombard 
Street : but then it was Dickens' way to take 
liberties with topography, as with the physical 
peculiarities of people, in his desire to achieve 
certain effects. There is at least this circumstance 
in support of my theory : that the Beadnell's bus- 
iness house was the only old-fashioned business 
house of that particular type which Dickens knew 
intimately ; and that, when he knew it, he had had 
so little experience of luxury, and was, moreover, 
in such a state of exaltation, as to be unduly im- 
pressed by its magnificence. 

He describes the official premises thus : 
*• Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old- 
fashioned place. ... It was very small, very dark, 
very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old- 
fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute 
that the partners in the House were proud of its 

26 



MISS MARIA. BEADNELL 

smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugli- 
ness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were 
even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, 
and were fired by an express conviction that, if it 
were less objectionable, it would be less respect- 
able. This was no passive belief, but an active 
weapon which they flashed at more convenient 
places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted 
no elbow room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tell- 
son'swanted no embellishment. NoakesandCo.'s 
might, or Snooks Brothers' might ; but Tellson's 
thank Heaven ! — 

" Any one of these partners would have disin- 
herited his son on the question of rebuilding Tell- 
son's. . . . Thus it had come to pass that Tellson's 
was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. 
After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy 
with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tell- 
son's down two steps, and came to your senses in 
a miserable little shop, with two little counters, 
where the oldest of men made your cheque shake 
as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the 
signature by the dingiest of windows, which . . . 
weremade the dingier by their own iron bars. . . . 
If your business necessitated your seeing 'the 
House,' you were put intoaspeciesof Condemned 
Hold at the back, where you meditated on a mis- 
spent life, until the House came with its hands in 
its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the 
dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or 
27 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles 
of which flew up your nose and down your throat 
when they were opened or shut. Your banknotes 
had a musty odour, as if they were fast decom- 
posing into rags again. Your plate was stowed 
away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil 
communications corrupted its good polish in a 
day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised 
strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and 
fretted out all the fat from their parchments into 
the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of fa- 
mily papers went upstairs into a Barmecideroom, 
that always had a great dining-table in it, and 
never had a dinner." 

It was very likely in this Barmecide room that 
Dickens first met Maria Beadnell ; but to him the 
whole house may have reeked of opulence, and 
he, like Kate Nickleby,may have been "perfectly 
absorbed in amazement at the richness and splen- 
dour of the furniture. The softest and most ele- 
gant carpets, the most exquisite pictures, the cost- 
liest mirrors ; articles of richest ornament, quite 
dazzling from their beauty and perplexing from 
the prodigality with which they were scattered 
around. . . . The very staircase nearlydown to the 
hall door, was crammed with beautiful and luxuri- 
ous things, as though the house were brim-full of 
riches, which, with a very trifling addition, would 
fairly run over into the street." 



28 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

The Beadnells seem to have been hospitable 
folk wholoved toentertain theirfriends. And pro- 
bably it was for the sake of the three girls that 
most of the guests who came to that queer old 
house wereyoung. Margaret, theeldest daughter, 
was courted byone David Lloyd, who eventually 
married her in 1831. The second girl, Anne, 
espoused a friend of Dickens, Henry Kolle, and 
became Mrs. Kolle in 1833. Both these young 
men were of the prosperous middle-class, steady, 
diligent, eager to get on in the world, and so likely 
to find favour in the eyes of the well-to-do banker. 
Both their love-affairs were in the budding stage 
when Kolle introduced his friend, Charles Dick- 
ens, to the Beadnell household. 

Atthattime Dickens wasamereyouthof seven- 
teen or eighteen. Having grown dissatisfiedwith 
his prospects in the law, he had recently made up 
his mind to qualify himself for the vocation that 
his father had latelyadopted : that of anewspaper 
parliamentary reporter. 

" He set resolutely therefore to the study of 
shorthand ; and, for the additional help of such 
general information about books as a fairly edu- 
cated youth might be expected to have, as well 
as to satisfy some higher personal cravings, he 
became an assiduous attendant at the British 
Museum reading-room. ... Of the difficulties 
that beset hisshorthand studies, as well as of what 
first turned his mind to them, he has told some- 
29 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

thing in Copperfield. He had heard that many 
men distinguished in various pursuits had begun 
life by reporting debates in Parliament, and he 
was not deterred by a friend's warning that the 
mere mechanical accomplishment for excellence 
in it might take a few years to master thoroughly, 
' a perfect and entire command of the mystery of 
shorthand writing and reading being about equal 
in difficulty to the mastery of six languages.' Un- 
daunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this 
as in graver things ; and, having bought Mr. Gur- 
ney's half-guinea book, worked steadily his way 
through its distractions. 

'"The changes that were rung upon dots, which 
in such a position meant such a thing,and in such 
another positionsomething elseentirely different; 
the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; 
the unaccountable consequences that resulted 
from marks like flies' legs ; the tremendous effects 
of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled 
my waking hours, but reappeared before me in 
my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, 
through these difficulties, and had mastered the 
alphabet, there then appeared a procession of 
new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most 
despotic characters I have ever known, who in- 
sisted, forinstance, that athing like the beginning 
of a cobweb meant expectation, and that a pen- 
and-ink skyrocket stood for disadvantageous. 
When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I 

30 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

found that they had driven everything else out of 
it ; then, beginning again, I forgot them ; while I 
was picking them up I dropped the other frag- 
ments of the system ; in short, it was almost heart- 
breaking.' " 

But " what it was that made it not quite heart- 
breaking to the hero of fiction its readers know 
(says Forster in his only mention of Miss Bead- 
nell, whose name he seems never to have heard). 
And something of the same kind was now to enter 
into the actual experience of its writer. . . . He, 
too, had his Dora, at apparently the same hope- 
less elevation ; striven for as the one only thing 
to be attained, and even more unattainable, for 
neither did he succeed nor happilydidshedie ; but 
the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to 
exertion at the time, and otherwise opening out 
to the idolator, both in fact and fiction, a highly 
unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh 
and tell him I had no belief in any but the book 
Dora, until the incident of the sudden reappear- 
ance of the real one in his life, nearly six yearsafter 
Copperfield was written, convinced me there had 
been a more actual foundation for those chapters 
of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still I 
would hardly admit it ; and, that the matter could 
possibly affect him then, persisted in a stout re- 
fusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little 
light on this j uvenile part of his career, and I there- 
fore venture to preserve it. 
31 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

" ' I don't quite apprehend what you mean by 
my overrating the strength of the feeling of five- 
and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own 
feeling, and will only think what the desperate in- 
tensity of my nature is, and that this began when 
I was Charley's age ; that it excluded every other 
idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life 
when four years are equal to four times four ; and 
that I went at it with a determination to over- 
come all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up 
into newspaper life, and floated me away over a 
hundred men's heads ; then you are wrong, be- 
cause nothing can exaggerate that. I have posi- 
tively stood amazed at myself ever since ! 

'"And so I suffered,andsoworked,andsobeat 
and hammered away at the maddest romances 
that evergot intoanyboy'sheadand stayed there, 
that to see the mere cause of it all now loosens my 
hold upon myself. Without for a moment sin- 
cerely believing that it would have been better 
if we had never got separated, I cannot see the 
occasion of so much emotion as I should see in 
anyone else. No one can imagine in the most dis- 
tant degree what pain the recollection gave me in 
Copperjield. And just as I can never open that 
book as I open any other book, I cannot see the 
face (even at four-and-forty), or hear the voice, 
without going wandering away over the ashes 
of all that youth and hope in the wildest man- 
ner.' 

32 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

*' More and more plainly seen, however, in the 
light of four-and-forty,the romanceglided visibly 
away, its work being fairly done ; and at the close 
of the month followinof that in which this letter 
was written, during which he had very quietly 
made a formal call at his youthful Dora's house, 
and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the 
hall, her stuffed favourite Jip, he began the fiction 
in which there was a Flora to set against its prede- 
cessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. 
The fancy had a comic humour in it he found it 
impossible toresist, but it was kindly and pleasant 
to the last ; and if the later picture showed him 
plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, 
there is nothing he thought of more tenderly than 
the earlier, as long as he was conscious of any- 
thing." 

So, it is seen that Dickens had fallen in love 
with thedainty, petite Maria Beadnell,whoseems 
to have been in many respects a charming girl, 
but an inveterate coquette. She, attracted by this 
romantic boy of the glowing, flashing eyes, flirted 
with him, practised all her maiden arts upon his 
youthful susceptibility, led him on and eluded him, 
was towardly and coy, everything in turns and 
nothing long. 

What was she like? We catch our first glimpse 
of her, I think, in the sturdy staunch old lock- 
smith's house in Barnaby Rudge. Her roguish 
33 c 



! 

THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

beauty beams at us from the looking-glass of 
Dolly Varden. She had "a face lighted up by the 
loveliest pair of sparkling eyes . . . the face of a 
pretty, laughing girl, dimpled and fresh and heal- 
thful — the very impersonation of good-humour 
and blooming beauty." She strikes her admirer, 
Joe Willet, "quite dumb with her beauty . . in all 
the glow and grace of youth, with all her charms 
increased a hundredfold by a most becoming 
dress, by a thousand little coquettish ways which 
nobody could assume with a better grace . ." And 
*' there she was again, the very pink and pattern 
of good looks, in a smart little cherry-coloured 
mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her 
head, and upon the top of that hood a little straw 
hat trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons and 
worn the merest trifle on one side — ^just enough, 
in short, to make it the wickedest and most pro- 
voking head-dress that ever malicious milliner 
devised. And not to speak of the manner in which 
these cherry-coloured decorations brightened her 
eyes, or vied with her lips, or shed a new bloom 
on her face, she wore such a cruel little muff, and 
such a heartrending pair of shoes, and was so sur- 
rounded and hemmed in, as it were, by aggrava- 
tions of all kinds, that when Mr. Tappertit, hold- 
ing the horse's head, saw her come out of the 
house alone, such impulses came over him to de- 
coy her into the chaise and drive off like mad, 
that he would unquestionably have done it, but 

3i 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

for certain uneasy doubts besetting him as to the 
shortest way to Gretna Green." 

Again, on a certain fine bright night, Dolly, for 
all her lowness of spirits, ' ' kept looking up at the 
stars in a manner so bewitching (and she knew it) 
that Joe was clean out of his senses, and plainly 
showed -that if ever a man were — not to say over 
head and ears, but over the Monument and the 
topof St. Paul'sinlove.thatmanwas himself. The 
road was a very good one; not at all a jolting road, 
or an uneven one; and yet Dolly held the side of 
the chaise with one little hand, all the way. If 
there had been an executioner behind him with 
an uplifted axe ready to chop off his head if he 
touched that hand, J oecouldn'thave helped doing 
it. From putting his own hand upon it as if by 
chance, and taking it away again after a minute 
or so, he got to riding along without taking it off 
at all ; as if he, the escort, were bound to do that 
as an important part of his duty, and had come out 
for the purpose. The most curious circumstance 
about this little incident was that Dolly didn't 
seem to know of it. She looked so innocent and 
unconscious when she turned her eyes on Joe, 
that it was quite provoking. 

•• She talked though, talked about her fright, 
and about J oe's coming up to rescue her, and about 
her gratitude, and about her fear that she might 
not have thanked him enough, and about their 
always being friends from that time forth — and 
35 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

about all that sort of thing. And when Joe said, 
not friends he hoped, Dolly was quite surprised 
and said not enemies she hoped ; and when Joe 
said, couldn't they be something much better than 
either, Dolly all of a sudden found out a star which 
was brighter than all the other stars, and begged 
to call his attention to the same, and was ten thou- 
sand times more innocent and unconscious than 
ever." 

I think there can be no doubt that Dolly Varden 
was founded on Maria Beadnell. She was really 
the first girl, the first ingenue, that Dickens suc- 
ceeded in investing with any semblance of life. 
And she came into being just long enough after 
the period of his youthful infatuation to be hand- 
led with delicacy and at the same time with fond 
playfulness. Later on, when Dickens was at his 
apogee, he boldly, lovingly idealised her; and of 
all his idealised women Dora Spenlow is the only 
one who interests us. I twill be seen that she bears 
a close resemblance to Dolly Varden, although 
she is of altogether finer texture, simple and art- 
less, single-minded and sincere. 

*' She was (says David Copperfield, Dickens' 
mouthpiece) more than human to me. She was a 
Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was — any- 
thing that no one ever saw, and everything thatj 
everybody ever wanted. . . I don't remember whol 
was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea 
what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My im-j 

3< 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

pressionis that I dined off Dora entirely, and sent 
away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next 
to her. I talked to her. She had the most delight- 
ful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleas- 
antest and most fascinating little ways that ever 
led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was 
rather diminutive altogether. So much the more 
precious, I thought. ... I never saw such curls — 
how could I, for there never were such curls? — 
as those she shook out to hide her blushes. As 
to the straw hat with blue ribbons which was on 
the top of the curls, if I could only have hung it up 
in my room in Buckingham Street, what a price- 
less possession it would have been. . . . 

"All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my 
destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved 
Dora Spenlowto distraction! . . . I was swallowed 
up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was 
nopausingon the brink ; no looking down or look- 
ing back ; I was gone, headlong, . . . 

" Within the first week of my passion I bought 
four sumptuous waistcoats — not for myself; /had 
no pride in them ; for Dora — and took to wearing 
straw-coloured kid gloves in the streets, and 
laid the foundations of all the corns I have ev- 
er had. If the boots I wore at that period could 
only be produced and compared with the natural 
size of my feet, they would show what the 
state of my heart was in a most affecting man- 
ner. . . . 
37 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

" I don't think I had any definite idea where 
Dora came from, or in what degree she was re- 
lated to a higher order of beings ; but I am quite 
sure I should havescouted the notion of her being 
simply human, like any other young lady, with in- 
dignation and contempt. If I may so express it I 
was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head 
and ears in love with her, but I was saturated 
through and through. Enough love might have 
been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, 
to drown anybody in ; and yet there would have 
remained enough within me, and all over me, to 
pervade my entire existence." 

So far the story follows the events of that peri- 
od of green-sickness ; but Dickens' imagination 
overleaps the bounds of actual cold experience 
and he pictures that impossibly ecstatic moment 
of the realisation of his boyish dream. 

" I don't know how I did it. I did it inamoment. 
I intercepted Jip. I had Dora in my arms. I was 
full of eloquence. I never stopped for a word. I 
told her how I loved her. I told her I should die 
without her. I told her that I idolised and wor- 
shipped her. . . . When Dora hung her head and 
cried and trembled, my eloquence increased so 
much the more. If she would like me to die for 
her she had but to say the word and I was ready. 
Life without Dora's love was not a thing to have 
upon any terms. I couldn t bear it, and I wouldn't. 
I had loved her everyminute,dayand night, since 

38 



I 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

I first saw her. I loved her at that moment to dis- 
traction. I should always love her, every minute, 
to distraction. Lovershadloved before, andlovers 
would love again ; but no lover had ever loved, 
might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved 
Dora ... I suppose we had some notion that this 
was to end in marriage. We must have had some, 
because Dorastipulated that we were never to be 
married without her papa's consent. But, in our 
youthful ecstasy, I don't think that we really 
looked before us or behind us ; or had any aspira- 
tion beyond the ignorant present. . . . What an 
idle time it was ! What an unsubstantial, happy, 
foolish time it was ! . . . Of all the times of mine 
that Time has in his grip, there is none that in 
one retrospect I can smile at half so much, or 
think of half so tenderly." 

We are vouchsafed other glimpses of this 
fairy-like figure, growing ever more and more 
unreal and indistinct, as the child-wife, trying to 
be a woman. 

"* Oh, what a weary boy!' said Dora one night, 
when I met her eyes as I was shutting up my 
desk. 

" ' What a weary girl! ' said I. * That's more to 
the purpose. You must go to bed another time, 
my love. It's far too late for you.' 

" * No, don't send me to bed ! ' pleaded Dora, 
coming to my side. * Pray don't do that.' 

" • Dora ! ' 
39 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

" To my amazement she was sobbing on my 
neck. 

" * Not well, my dear ! not happy ! ' 

'"Yes, quite well, and very happy!' said Dora. 
* But say you'll let me stop and see you write.' 

" ' Why, what a sight for such bright eyes at 
midnight ! ' I replied. 

" ' Are they bright, though ? ' returned Dora, 
laughing. ' I'm so glad they're bright.' 

*** Little Vanity!' said I. 

" But it was not vanity; it was only harmless 
delight in my admiration. I knew that very well, 
before she told me so. 

** * If you think them pretty, say I may always 
stop and see you write ! ' said Dora. ' Do you 
think them pretty } ' 

" ' Very pretty.' 

" * Then let me always stop and see you write.' 

" * I am afraid that won't improve their bright- 
ness, Dora.' 

*' * Yes, it will ! Because, you clever boy, you'll 
not forget me then, when you are full of silent ] 
fancies. Will you mind if I say something very, 
very silly ? — more than usual ? ' inquired Dora, 
peeping over my shoulder into my face. 

" ' What wonderful thing is that ?' said I. 

'* ' Please let me hold the pens,' said Dora. * I 
want to havesomething to do with all those many 
hours when you are so industrious. May I hold 
the pens ? ' " 

40 




MARIA BEADNELL 
"Dolly Varden" and other characters 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

And in the end she fades away. She does not 
die, but rather seems to pass into the region of 
those radiant shadows to which she belongs. 

" It is night; and I am with her still. . . . We 
are now alone. 

" Do I know now that my child-wife will soon 
leave me? They have told me so ; they have told 
me nothing new tomythoughts ; but I amfarfrom 
sure that I have taken that truth to heart. . . . 

" ' I am going to speak to you, Doady. I am 
going to say something I have often thought of 
saying, lately. . . . Doady, dear, I am afraid I was 
too young.' 

" I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and 
she looks into my eyes and speaks very softly. 
Gradually, as she goes on, I feel, with a stricken 
heart, that she is speaking of herself as past. 

" * I am afraid, dear, I was too young. I don't 
mean in years only, but in experienceand thoughts 
and everything. I was such a silly little creature ! 
I am afraid it would have been better if we had 
only loved one another as a boy and girl, and for- 
gotten it. I have begun to think I was not fit to 
be a wife.' 

' ' I try to stay my tears, and to reply, * Oh, Dora, 
love, as fit as I to be a husband ! ' 

" *I don't know,' with the old shake of her curls. 
'Perhaps! But if I had been more fit to be marri- 
ed, I might have made you more so, too. Besides, 
you are very clever, and I never was.' 
41 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

*" We have been very happy, my sweet Dora.' 

" * I was very happy, very. But, as years went 
on, my dear boy would have wearied of his child- 
wife. She would have been less and less a com- 
panion for him. He would have been more and 
more sensible of what was wanting in his home. 
She wouldn't have improved. It is better as it is.' 

" ' Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to 
me so. Every word seems a reproach.' . . . 

'"Oh, how my poor boy cries! Hush, hush! . . . 
I said that it was better as it is ! ' she whispers, as 
she holds me in her arms. ' Oh, Doady, after more 
years, you never could have loved your child- 
wife better than you do; and, after more years, she 
wouldsohavetriedand disappointed you,thatyou 
might not have been able to love her half so well ! 
I know I was too young and foolish. It is much 
better as it is.'" \ 

In the light of Dickens' later experience of 
his boyish ideal, Maria Beadnell, these last words 
seem prophetic. 

I 

I 

Itwasmuch better as it was. It was much better 
that not only should Maria's coquetry stand in the 
way of their union, but that her father should also 
look with disfavour upon the suit of a mere news- 
paper reporter. George Beadnell seems to have 
known his daughter well. He seems to have 
known that she was in no danger of succumbing 
to the fascinations of her comely but impecunious 

43 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

young wooer. So he permits the flirtation to go 
on for a time, standing aside and watching its pro- 
gress with cynical amusement. Then, suddenly, 
as the affair takes on a graver complexion, ceases 
to be merely amusing and threatens to become 
serious, he steps in, declares that all this folly must 
end, and forbids Dickens his house. 

Dickens, in exile, returns " the little present " 
that Maria had once given him, with these words: 

" A wish for your happiness, although it comes 
from me, may not be the worse for being sincere 
and heartfelt. Accept it as it ismeant, and believe 
that nothing will afford me more real delight than 
to hear that you, the object of my first and my last 
love, are happy. I f you are as happy as I hope you 
may be, you will indeed possess every blessing 
that this world can afford." 

For a while they corresponded, through the 
agency of Kolle, who acted as love's messenger 
and smuggled Dickens' letters past the parental 
barriers into the hands of Maria. Kolle, then, 
although he appears in none of the official bio- 
graphies, was a close friend of Dickens. H e died 
thirty years ago, and only recently have Dickens' 
letters to him and to Maria Beadnell * been pub- 
lished — in America. It is from these letters that 

* Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell: Private Correspon- 
dence between Charles Dickens and Mrs. Henry Winter {n^e 
Maria Beadnell), the original of Dora Spenlow in David Copper- 
field ■as^di Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. — The Earliest Letters 
of Charles Dickens : Written to his friend, Henry Kolle. 

43 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

one learns of Dickens' early passion and blighted 
hopes. He opened his heart to Kolle. In the first 
letter of the former series he apologises to his 
friend for not having kept an appointment. He 
asks him to make another. * ' I fear," he says, " until 
the House is up (Dickens was then in the press 
gallery of the House of Commons) I can name no 
certain night on which I can go to the play, except 
Saturday." The letter ends " with my best remem- 
brances to (?)." The letter was most likely written 
in thespringof i830,and soit is fairly evident that 
" (?) " means Maria Beadnell. j 

In another letter to Kolle he says : j 

"I would really feel some delicacy in asking you 
again to deliver the enclosed as addressed, were 
it not for two reasons. In the first place you know 
so well my existing situation that you must be al- 
most perfectly aware of the general nature of the 
note, and in the second I should not have written 
it, for I should have communicated its contents 
verbally, were it not that I lost the opportunity of 
keeping the old gentleman out of the way as long 
as possible last night. To these reasons you may 
add that I have not the slightest objection to your 
knowing its contents from the first syllable to the 
last. I trustunderthesecircumstancesthatyou will 
not object to doing me the very essential service 
of delivering the enclosed as soon this afternoon 
as you can, and perhaps you will accompany the 

44] 



d 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

delivery by asking Miss Beadnell only to read it 
when she is quite alone. Of course in this sense I 
consider you as nobody." 

That letter was answered by the coquette, who 
was still loth to relinquish her last hold upon her 
would-be lover. But the tone of her responses 
grows evercolder and colder, until in despair poor 
Dickens writes thus to Kolle : 

" I enclose a very conciliatory note, Sans Pride, 
Sans Reserve, Sans anything but an evidentwish 
to be reconciled. ... By the way, if I had many 
friends in the habit of marrying, which friends had 
brothers who possessed an extensive assortment 
of choice hock, I should be dead in no time. . . . 
Yesterday I felt like a maniac, to-day my interior 
resembles a lime-basket." 

To this " conciliatory note," which is not pre- 
served, the reply was "cold and reproachful." 
Dickens was finally dismissed by his captious 
mistress. " Least said soonestmended," hewrites 
to Kolle in his only laconic comment on the un- 
happy termination of the affair. But, later on, he 
writes again to Maria out of the depths of his 
bruised heart : " I have never loved, and I never 
can love, any human creature breathing but your- 
self. We have had many differences, and we have 
lately been entirely separated. Absence, how- 
ever, has not altered my feelings in the slightest 
45 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

degree, and the love I now tender you is as pure 
and as lasting as at any period of our former cor-j 
respondence." 

So, one poor dream was ended, and another 
more splendid dream began ... to continue until 
the year 1855, when Dickens again met the lady 
of his earlyadoration, married now toa Mr. Henry 
Winter ; and then he awoke as with a start from 
his long beautiful dream to find himself, cold and 
alone and naked, a little ashamed of his former 
self and laughing fretfully, in the bleak outer 
darkness of disillusion. 

Mrs. Henry Winter, who had once been Miss 
Maria Beadnell, but who had never been the 
woman of Dickens' ideal, lives for the first time, 
as she lived in the flesh, as Flora Pinching in 
Little Dorrit. Dickens' newstalking-horse is now 
the rather shadowy and tedious Clennam. Clen- 
nam goes to the house of the Patriarchal humbug 
Casby, and there meets Plora aftermany years of 
separation. His "eyes no sooner fell upon the 
subject of his old passion, than it shivered and 
broke to pieces. 

* * M ost men (the narrative goes on) will be found 
sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old 
idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but 
exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear 
close comparison with the reality, and the con- 
trast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam's 



1 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

case. In his youth he had ardently loved this 
woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked- 
up wealth of his affection and imagination. That 
wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robin- 
son Crusoe's money ; exchangeable with no one, 
lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out 
for her. Ever since that memorable time ... he 
had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in 
its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last 
of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, 
saying in effect, ' Be good enough to throw it 
down and dance upon it. This is Flora.' 

" Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad 
too, and short of breath ; but that was not much. 
Flora, whom he had leftalily, had becomeapeony ; 
but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed 
enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse 
and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been 
spoiled and artless longago, was determined to be 
spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow." 

" This is Flora ! " 

Poor Flora ! Poor Dickens ! 

She ogles him, she angles for compliments 
(which he good-humouredlypays her), she tosses 
her head and giggles and bridles, is ridiculously 
arch and coy and girlish, dwells romantically upon 
the vanished past, and languishes at him. And 
all the while she talks and talks and talks, " run- 
ning on with astonishing speed, and pointing her 
47 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

conversation with nothing but commas, and very 
few of them." " Was it possible (asks Dickens in 
the person of Clennam) that Flora could have 
been such a chatterer in the days she referred to ? 
Could there have been anything like her present 
disjointed volubility in the fascinations that had 
captivated him ? " 

"... I assure you, Flora (says her old lover), 
I am happy in seeing you once more, and in find- 
ing that, like me, you have not forgotten the old 
foolish dreams, when we saw all before us in the 
light of our youth and hope." 

"You don't seem so," pouted Flora, " you take 
it very coolly, but however I know you are dis- 
appointed in me . . . perhaps I am the cause my- 
self. It's just as likely." 

"No, no," Clennam entreated, "don't say that.'l 

" Oh, I must, you know," said Flora, in a posi- 
tive tone, " what nonsense not to, I know I am 
not what you expected, I know that very well." 

In the midst of her rapidity she had found 
that out with the quick perception of a cleverert 
woman. The inconsistent and profoundly un-| 
reasonable way in which she instantly went on^ 
nevertheless, to interweave their long-abandon-l 
ed boy and girl relations with theirpresent inter- 
view, made Clennam feel as if he were lighthead- 
ed 

He tried at parting to give his hand in frank- 
ness to the existing Flora — not the vanished 

48 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

Flora . . but Flora wouldn't have it, couldn't have 
it, was wholly destitute of the power of separating 
herself and him from their bygone characters. 
He left the house miserably enough. . . . 

He could not walk on thinking for ten minutes, 
without recalling Flora. She necessarily recalled 
to him his life, with all its misdirection and little 
happiness ... so long, so bare, so blank. No child- 
hood, no youth, except for one remembrance ; 
that one remembrance proved only that day to be 
a piece of folly. 

It was a misfortune to him, trifle as it might 
have been to another. For while all that was hard 
and stern in his recollection remained reality on 
being proved — was obdurate to the sight and 
touch, and relaxed nothing of its old indomitable 
grimness — the one tender recollection of his ex- 
perience would not bear the same test, and melted 

' away. . . . 

He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was 

' a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief 
in all the gentle and good things his life had been 

■ without . . . and . . . this had rescued him to judge 
not, and in humility to be merciful, and have hope 
and charity. And this saved him still from the 
whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of 
holding that because such a happiness or such a 
virtue had not come into his little path, or worked 
well for him, therefore it was not in the great 
scheme, but was reducible, when found in appear- 
49 D 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

ance,to the basest elements. A disappointed mind 
he had, but a mind too firm and healthy for such 
unwholesome air. Leaving himself in the dark, 
it could riseinto the light, seeing it shineon others 
and hailing it. 

Therefore he sat before his dying fire, sorrow- 
ful to think upon the way by which he had come 
to that night, yet not strewing poison on the way 
by which othermen hadcometoit. That heshould 
have missed so much, and at his timeof life should 
look so far about him for any staff to bear him 
company upon his downward journey and cheer 
it, was a just regret. He looked at the fire from 
which the blaze departed, from which the after- 
glow subsided, in which the ashes turned grey,| 
from which they dropped to dust, and thought, 
" How soon I too shall pass through such changes 
and be gone ! " 

To review his life was like descending a green 
tree in fruit and flower, and seeingall the branches 
wither and drop off one by one, as he came down 
towards them. 

From that moment of his great disillusion 
Dickens was a changed man. He was so greatly 
changed that his art was perceptibly affected. 
Never again does he recapture his old careless 
mastery over his material. It is as if, from that 
time onward, he is forced, almost against his will, 
to examine and criticise the healthy, hearty ideals 

50 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

of his youth : his youth that has lasted in the full 
bloom of its virginal innocence until now, and ev- 
ennowis only a littlefaded, a little sere. But what 
he has lost in buoyancy he has gained in steadi- 
ness ; what he has lost in lightness of heart he has 
gained in depth of insight and intensity of feeling. 
He does not forget that idyll of his youth, or the 
wanton maid who was its heroine ; but he re- 
members, he wears his rue, with a difference. He 
remembers the pain as well as the ecstasy, and he 
raises the corpse of his old love from the dead in 
the person of Estellain Great Expectations, which 
was his next novel — as distinct from his romance 
A Tale of Two Cities and his later Christmas 
stories — after Little Dorrit. 

Pip is Estella's victim. She scorns him in his 
coarse boyhood, on oneoccasion slaps hisface,and 
on every occasion flouts him. He meets her again 
in early manhood in the house where he had first 
made her acquaintance. He believes that it was 
reserved for him to marry Estella and to "restore 
the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the 
dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold 
hearths a-blazing ... in short, do all the shining 
deeds of the young Knight of Romance, and 
marry the Princess "... Estella ! 

He pauses to look at the house. 

. . . its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, 
and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of 
51 



i 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with 
sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive' 
mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella wa 
the inspiration and the heart of it, of course. But 
though she had taken such strong possession of 
me, though my fancy and my hope were so set 
upon her, though her influence on my boyish Hfe 
and character had been all powerful, I did not, 
even that romantic morning, invest her with any 
attributes save those she possessed. I mention 
this in this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is 
the clue by which I am to be followed into my 
poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the 
conventional notion of a lover cannot be always 
true. The unqualified truth is that when I loved 
Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply 
because I found her irresistible. Once for all, I 
knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always/ 
that I loved her against reason, against promise, 
against peace, against hope, against happiness, 
against all discouragement that could be. Once, 
for all, I loved her none the less because I kneW 
it, and it had no more influence in restraining me 
than if I had devoutly believed her to be human 
perfection. i 

And in the record of what happened between 
Pip and his Estella we catch an echo of the story 
of those sad relations which had once existed be- 
tween Charles Dickens himself and Maria Bead- 
nell. 5^ 






MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

I suffered (says Pip) every kind and degree of 
torture that E Stella could cause me. The nature 
of my relations with her, which placed me on 
terms of familiarity without placing me on terms 
of favour, conduced to my distraction. She made 
use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned 
the very familiarity between herself andme to the 
accountofputtingaconstant slight on my devotion 
to her. If I had been her secretary, steward, half- 
brother, poor relation — if I had been a younger 
brother ot her appointed husband — I could not 
have seemed to myself further from my hopes 
when I was nearest to her. The privilege of call- 
ing her by her name and hearing her call me by 
mine became under the circumstances an aggra- 
vation of my trials ; and while I think it likely 
that it almost maddened her other lovers, I knew 
too certainly that it almost maddened me. 

She had admirers without end. No doubt my 
jealousy made an admirer of everyone who went 
near her ; but there were more than enough of 
them without that. 

I saw her often . . . there were picnics, fete days, 
plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of plea- 
sures, through which I pursued her — and they 
were all miseries to me. I never had one hour's 
happiness in her society, and yet my mind all 
round the four-and-twenty hours was harping 
on the happiness of having her with me unto 
death. 
'S3 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Dickens wrote one more novel, Our Mutual 
Friend, and therein paints his first really consis- 
tent portrait of an average young and pretty girl 
of the middle class. Bella Wilfer is quite human : 
the most human of all his heroines. She is not a* 
vain toy like Dolly Varden, or a dainty imposs- 
ible fairy like Dora Spenlow. She palpitates with 
life. She is the inevitable product of her environ-| 
ment and her peculiar circumstances. From the 
moment when she is first presented, "seated on 
the rug to warm herself, with her brown eyes on 
the fire and a handful of her brown curls in her 
mouth," laughing, pouting, and half crying, dis- 
contented and rebellious, whimsical and peevish, 
inclined to be selfish and self-willed ; in all her 
comically pathetic adventures with her cherubic 
father ; and throughout her gradual development 
into a fond and loving wife ; until at last she lays 
her little right hand on her husband's eyes and 
says : " Do you remember, John, on the day we 
weremarried,Pa'sspeakingoftheshipsthatmight 
be sailing towards us from the unknown seas ? " 
" Perfectly, my darling ! " "I think . . . among 
them . . . there is a ship upon the ocean . . . 
bringing ... to you and me ... a little baby, 
John." 

Always Bella Wilfer is alive. She rescues 
Dickens from the reproach that he could not de- 
pict a typical English girl. For so much added 
strength and wisdom, so much perfected artistry, 

54 



MISS MARIA BEADNELL 

had his Disillusion taught Dickens in the last few 
years of his life. For so much, then, should we be 
grateful to the lady of his first great passion, 
Maria Beadnell,thememoryof whom kept bright 
so many years his ideal of womanhood, and only 
shattered that ideal when he was old enough to 
have acquired a little philosophy. 




MARY HOGARTH 
"Kate Nickleby" and other characters 



CHAPTER THE THIRD 

OF TWO WOMEN: II. MARY 

HOGARTH 



CHAPTER THE THIRD OF 

TWO women; II. MARY HOGARTH 

MARIA BEADNELL, DICKENS' LESS- 

er ideal woman, as we have seen, came to earth 
in his later years, and shattered the golden web 
of illusion that he had spun about her. But 
Dickens' greater ideal woman died in her girl- 
hood. Her epitaph, written by Dickens, is still 
to be seen upon her gravestone in the cemeteryat 
Kensal Green, and runs: " Young, beautiful, and 
good, God numbered her among his angels at the 
early age of seventeen." 

Her name was Mary Hogarth. She was the 
next youngest sister of Dickens' wife. Immedi- 
ately after the young couple's honeymoon, Dick- 
ens and his bride returned to London and made 
their home at No. 15 Furnival's Inn. There Mary 
Hogarth often stayed, indeed practically lived, 
with them, her bright wit and amiable disposition 
proving an inexhaustible source of joyful refresh- 
ment in the little household. Herpremature death 
so unnerved Dickens that the course oi Pickwick 
and Oliver Twist (produced almost simultane- 
ously) was temporarily interrupted. Writing 
some few weeks afterwards toMrs. Hogarthfrom 
his next abode, he said : " I wish you could know 
how I weary now for the three rooms in Furni- 
val's Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and 
those sweet words which, bestowed upon our eve- 
ning's work, on our merry banterings round the 
59 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

fire, were more precious to me than the applause 
of a whole world would be." 

"His grief and suffering were intense (says For- 
ster, corroboratively),and affected him, as will be 
seen, through many after years." 

In 1 84 1 his wife's younger brother " died with 
the same unexpected suddenness that had at- 
tended her younger sister's death ; and the event 
had followed close upon the decease of Mrs. Hog- 
arth's mother while on a visit to her daughter and 
Mr. Hogarth." 

In reference to these fresh bereavements Dic- 
kens wrote : 

As no steps had been taken towards the funeral, 
I thought it best at once to bestir myself . . . It is a 
great trial to me to give up Mary's grave ; greater 
than I can possibly express. I thought of moving 
her to the catacombs, and saying nothing about it; 
but then I remembered that the poor old lady is 
buried next her at her own desire, and could not 
find it in my heart, directly she is laid in the earth, 
to take her grandchild away. The desire to be 
buried next her is as strong upon me now as it 
was five years ago; and I know (for I don't think 
there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will 
never diminish. I fear I can do nothing. Do you 
think I can ? They would move her on Wednes- 
day, if I resolved to have it done. I cannot bear 
the thought of being excluded from her dust ; and 
yet I feel that her brothers and sisters, and her 

60 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

mother, have a better right than I to be placed 
beside her. It is but an idea. I neither think nor 
hope (God forbid) that our spirits would ever 
mingle the^'e. I ought to get the better of it, but it 
is very hard. I never contemplated this — and 
coming so suddenly, and after being ill, it disturbs 
me more than it ought. It seems like losing her a 
second time. . . There is no ground on either side 
to be had. I must give it up. I shall drive over 
there, please God, on Thursday morning, before 
they get there ; and look at her coffin. 

A year later, during his first tour in America, 
Dickens visited Niagara, and from an hotel there 
writes thus : ** What would I give if the dear girl, 
whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to 
come so far along with us — but she has been here 
many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face 
faded from my earthly sight." 

Again, two years later, he writes from Venice, 
telling how he fell asleep, during an attack of sick- 
ness, and dreamed a dream. 

In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime 
in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I 
could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that 
I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the 
Madonnamight ina picture by Raphael ; and bore 
no resemblance to anyone I have known except 
in stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I re- 
cognised the voice. Anyway, I knew it was poor 
Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but ina great 
6i 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching 
out my arms to it called it " Dear." At this, I 
thought it recoiled ; and I felt ipimediately, that 
not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have 
addressed it so familiarly, "Forgive me!" I said. 
"Wepoor livingcreatures areonlyableto express 
ourselves by looks and words. I have used the word 
most natural to our affections ; and you know my 
heart." It was so full of compassion and sorrow 
for me — which I knew spiritually, for, as I have 
said, I did not perceive its emotions from its face 
— that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, 
" O ! give me some token that you have really 
visited me." ** Form a wish," it said. I thought, 
reasoning with myself: " I f I form a selfish wish it 
will vanish." So I hastily discarded such hopes 
and anxieties of my own as came into my mind, 
and said, " Mrs. Hogarth issurrounded with great 
distresses " — observe, I never thought of saying 
"your mother" as to a mortal creature — "will you 
extricateher?" "Yes." "And her extrication is to 
be a certainty to me that this has really happen- 
ed?" "Yes." "Butanswermeoneotherquestion!" 
I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave 
me. " What is the true religion?" As it paused a 
moment without replying, I said — Good God, in 
such an agony of haste, lest it should go away ! — 
"You think as I do that the Formof religion does 
not so greatly matter, if we try to do good ? — or," 
I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was 

62 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

moved with the greatest compassion for me, "per- 
haps the Roman Catholic is the best ? perhaps it 
makes one think of God oftener, and believe in 
him more steadily ? " " For you," said the Spirit, 
full of such heavenly tenderness for me that I felt 
as if my heart would break, "forj^^^^ it is the best!" 
Then I awoke, with the tears running down my 
face, and myself in exactly the condition of the 
dream. 

And again, from Devonshire Terrace, in the 
midst of a letter on indifferent topics, he reverts to 
his sorrow with tragic suddenness, in the words : 
" This day, eleven years ago, poor Mary died." 

And yet again, in the very year of his death, 
her influence is proved to be as potent upon him 
as ever. Again he speaks of her in that tone of 
unconquerable regret. 

She is so much in my thoughts at all times (he 
says), especially when I am successful, and have 
greatly prospered in anything, that the recollec- 
tion of her is an essential part of my being, and is 
as inseparable from my existence as the beating 
of my heart is. 

To some it may seem that there is a taint of 
morbidity in all this gloomy obsession. But . . . 
was it a gloomy obsession ? 

" It is not in the nature of pure love (says Dic- 
kens in Dombey and Son) to mourn so fiercely and 
unkindly long." 
63 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Dickens cherished andguarded the memoryof 
this beautiful girl, who had come into and passed 
out of his life like a visitant from another world, 
as we cherish and guard the innocence of our chil- 
dren. Her radiant figure stood tohim as a type of 
all the highest possibilities ofwhich mankind, and 
especially womankind, is capable. - 

I have said that Dickens clung to his illusions 
with all the tenacity of a child. He was a man of 
narrow butacuteperceptions.Hesawthings clear- 
ly; but as a rule he saw only one aspect of most 
things. Wilfullyhe shut his eyes to theworse side 
of human nature and life generally. Thus the very 
squalor of his backgrounds is invariably pictures- 
que; and the very vileness of his evil characters 
grotesque or whimsical. He could not, would not, 
dare not believe that there was anything or any- 
body wholly bad. He fought with all the vigour 
and earnestness of his sanguine temperament for 
his conception of a world in which goodness tri- 
umphed over badness. He needed always some 
standard of perfection by which to measure the ! 
moralstatureof his fellow creatures; and his ideal- 
ised memoryof Mary Hogarth provided him with 
that standard. As, one by one, his illusions faded, 
withered, anddied ; as, one by one, theuglier facts 
of life obtruded themselves more and more insist- 
ently upon him, so he clung the more tenaciously 
to his faith in the existence of an ideal human be- 
ing . . . somewhere! It was as necessary to his 

64 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

art, as to his perfervid nature, that he should hold 
that faith unflinchingly. 

I think that Dickens was not much given to in- 
trospection. He was not of that school of writers 
which is forever taking out its heart and examin- 
ing its works and passing it round for others' in- 
spection, like a boy with a new watch. He lived in 
other, simpler times than these. He worshipped 
other, simpler gods than the grim forces which the 
theory of evolution has created . H is was a religion 
of symbols : the symbol of the shrouded body, 
with its calm still face drained of all grossness, set 
in an expression of eternal peace; the symbols of 
the grave, and the Last Great Day of universal re- 
surrection, the pale shadows of wandering souls in 
the twilight of that bourne from whence no travel- 
ler returns, the Judgment and the shining hosts 
of Heaven, the lost legionsof Hell, God enthron- 
ed among his angels, discoursing celestial music. 

I think it was all as simple, or almost as sim- 
ple, as that to the immortal child Dickens. In the 
dream that he dreamed in Venice, when the Spirit 
of Mary Hogarth appeared to him in the guise of 
a conventional Madonna, it may be that we glim- 
pse darkly the gaunt spectres of doubt, misgiving, 
and inquiry that even in his crowded, hurried life, 
could not always be gainsaid. But, you will ob- 
serve that he was ill when that dream came to him. 
Itwasonlywhenhisbrainwassickthathisthoughts 
revolved about the mysteries of Here and Here- 

65 E 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

after. At all other times, at all such times as hisi 
thoughts ran easily and smoothly along the old ac- 
customed grooves, he took for granted all that he 
could not understand, and accepted without cavil 
or question what was beyond his readycomprehen- 
sion. H is mind worked as an infinitesimal part of 
a vastand intricate machine with the ulterior parts 
of which he had no earthly concern. And some 
sort of spiritual ideal is as necessary to the health 
of simple souls of that calibre as oxygen is neces- 
sary to the health of the body. 

The analogue of the parent and child recurs and 
clamours for further consideration. To the best 
types of father and mother there is no more agon- 
ising moment than that in which the child ceases 
tobeachild, discards its last vestures of childhood, 
and suddenly becomes a queer sort of stranger 
stalking the house in the likeness of its former self. 
For the younger generation is always so much 
more terribly wise than the old. It begins where 
the old generation ends. The mother, beholding 
a daughter for the first time in the place of her 
baby-girl, has an irreparable sense of loss. The 
father, watching the new-born son that was once 
his little laughing boy, feels naked as Elijah must 
have felt after he had cast his mantle upon Elisha. 
It is a change worse than death. The lost child 
lies more deeply buried than in the silence of the 
tomb. And that is why the child, who dies as a 
child, lives forever as a child in the hearts of its 

66 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

parents. That is why the children who die are al- 
ways so much more beautiful and bright and good 
than the children wholive. That is why, if they had 
not died, they would have grown into men and 

. women whose like the world has never looked 

; upon. 

Dickens believed in the perfect woman because 

; Mary H ogarth died in the dawn of her womanhood . 

, Dickens left his heroines on the steps of the marri- 

. age-altar, and fled from the vision of them as wives 
and mothers, because Mary Hogarth had never 

I husband or child. H is heroines, havingexisted as 

1 shadows, stiffened at the last into cold stark out- 
lines, as the shadowy figure of Mary Hogarth, hav- 
j ing passed away, stiffened in his memory into a 
j pure cold unearthly thing in a coffin. 

2 In vain he protests that he neither thinks nor 
J hopes that their spirits would ever mingle in the 
I grave. In spite of himself, as it were sub-consci- 
5 ously,he doessomehowcontrivetothinkandhope 
: that their spirits will so mingle ; or he would not 
,; long so passionately to be laid beside her, or so 
5 dread the thought of being excluded from her dust. 

3 He would not feel so much satisfaction in the pros- 
it pect of looking once again upon her coffin. 

^ In his dream of her she bearsnoresemblanceto 
J the bodily form of Mary Hogarth. He is not even 
, sure that he recognises her voice. And this is sig- 
; nificant as suggesting that his recollection of her 
pface and form and manner had long since become 
;67 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

vague. He remembered only the aura of heryouth 
and gaiety and beauty and goodness that had once? 
pervadedhis home like a heavenly presence. His> 
fancy could only visualiseherinthe guiseof a con- 
ventional Madonna, just as in his novels he coulc| 
only depict her in the guise of the simpering dolls 
with whose stereotyped prettiness and colourless- 
ness and mindlessness the fashionable Books of| 
Beauty of that artificial period had no doubt made 
him familiar. j 

In his types of folly and wickedness, of jollity, ' 
eccentricity, whimsicality, grotesquerie, and hear- 
ty simplicity, he was triumphantly successful, be- 
cause such types did not clash withhis ideals. But j 
he could notgraft folly on to both dignity and good- ' 
ness, or beauty on to both wickedness and folly. 
He could blend niceness with nastiness, as in the 
case of Carker ; he could make his rascals eccentric 
or whimsical or grotesque ; but he couldnot make 
them hearty or simple or jolly. To have done any 
of those things would have been to debase his 
ideals : to forfeit that most blessed heritage of im- 
mortal childishness which made him a genius. 

And so he presents to us that galaxy of amaz- 
ing dolls variously christened Rose Maylie, Kate 
Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little Nell, Emma 
Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dombey, Ag- 
nes Wickfield, Ada Clare, and LucyManette. On 
the subject of these femininanities much bitter 
black ink has been shed ; there has been much 

6i 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

laughter like the crackling of thorns under the pot 
of the pot-boiler. Modern criticism has exhausted 
itself in scathing denunciation of these poor pup- 
pets. And yet there is perhaps something to be 
said in defence of the convention that created 
them. Dickens was never a self-conscious artist. 
He had indeed no use for the word Art. And all 
classicism was Greek to him. Nevertheless, as I 
say, in this vexed matter of his heroines he proved 
himselfone oftheGreeks. They are goddesses all: 
not the goddesses of the Greek mythology, of 
course, but the angels of Christianity. They tower 
above the dear sweet women whom we knowand 
love and reverence as the huge stone effigies in the 
grounds of the Crystal Palace tower above the little 
Cockneygirls in their sweethearts' arms under the 
moonofa Bank Holiday night. Devoid ofall colour 
,and movement and warmth, gazing out upon the 
.worldwithsightlesseyes, immunefromtheillsthat 
,flesh and blood is heir to, aloof from the petty con- 
cerns of every day, immutable, unapproachable, 
severely correct, at once supremely perfect and 
supremelyuninteresting: they are as inhuman and 
repellent as they are beautiful, and as little like 
humanity as theyare like the seraphim. But this, 
which is accounted as a fault in Dickens, is hailed 
is sublimity in ^schylus or Sophocles. So inevit- 
ably does distance lend enchantment to the view. 
J Yet it must be confessed that these Dickens 
l^ieroines are great bores, when they are not some- 
J9 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS^' 

thing infinitely worse : that is to say, when thevti 
are not used as vehicles for the expression or I 
Dickens' incurable sentimentality. Their only 
merit consists in their author's ingenuous belief 
in their inherent attractiveness or in their power 
of pathetic appeal. And this belief is founded on 
the solid rock of his faith in a perfected woman- 
hood: a faith that grew out of his illusive memo- 
ries of that fair frail girl, who died without ever 
having lived — the Mary of his boyish dream! 

She makes her first appearance as Rose May- 
lie. She is described as being ... in the lovely 
bloom and springtime of womanhood ; at that age 
when, if ever angels be for God's good purposes 
enthroned in mortal forms, they may be without 
impiety supposed to abide in such as hers. She 
was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and ex- 
quisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and 
beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor 
its rough creatures her fit companions. The very 
intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and 
was stamped upon her noble head, seemed scarce- 
ly of her age, or of the world ; and yet the chang- 
ing expression of sweetness and good humour, 
the thousand lights that played about the face, 
and left no shadow there ; above all, the smile, the 
cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and 

fireside peace and happiness She playfully 

put back her hair, which was simply braided on 

70 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

her forehead ; and threw into her beaming look 
such an expression of affection and artless love- 
liness, that blessed spirits might have smiled to 
look upon her. 

That reads uncommonly like a fanciful por- 
trait of Mary Hogarth. She falls ill. And then in- 
deed one finds it hard to forgive Dickens for pil- 
ing on the agony, as he does, in this wise : 

Oh ! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, 
of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly 
love is trembling in the balance ! Oh, the rack- 
ing thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and 
make the heart beat violently, and the breath 
come thick, by the force of the images they con- 
jure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be do- 
ing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the 
danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the 
sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remem- 
brance of our helplessness produces ; what tor- 
tures can equal these; what reflections or endeav- 
ours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay 
them! 

Morning came, and thelittle cottage was lonely 
and still. People spoke in whispers ; anxious faces 
appeared at the gate, from time to time ; women 
and children went away in tears. . . ."It is hard," 
said the good doctor, turning away as he spoke ; 
" so young, so much beloved ; but there is very 
little hope." 
71 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Another morning. The sun shone brightly : 
as brightly as if it looked upon no misery or care; 
and, with every leaf and flower in full bloom about 
her : with life and health and sounds and sights 
of joy surrounding her on every side : the fair 
young creature lay, wasting fast. . . . 

There was such peace and beauty in the scene ; 
so much of brightness and mirth in the sunny 
landscape ; such blithesome music in the songs 
of the summer birds ; such freedom in the rapid 
flight of the rook, careering overhead ; so much of 
life and joyousness in all ; that . . . the thought 
instinctively occurred . . . that this was not a 
time for death ; that Rose could surely never die 
when humbler things were all so glad and gay ; 
that graves were for cold and cheerless winter ; 
not for sunlight and fragrance . . . that shrouds 
were for the old and shrunken ; and that they 
never wrapped the young and graceful form in 
their ghastly folds. 

A knell . . . Another! Again! It was tolling 
for the funeral service. A group of humble mour- 
ners entered the gate : wearing white favours ; for 
the corpse was young. They stood uncovered by 
a grave ; and there was a mother — a mother once 
— among the weeping train. But the sun shone 
brightly, and the birds sang on. 

It is all very crude and unnecessary and rather 
nauseous. But perhaps Mr. Percy Fitzgerald is 

72 



1 




HENRY BURNETT 
"Nicholas Nickleby" 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

right when he says : " There is such a feeling real- 
ity in the author's account of the illness of Rose 
Maylie that I am convinced the character was 
drawn from the Mary Hogarth whose loss he had 
felt so deeply and mourned so passionately. . . . 
These anxieties that he describes were surely his 
own personal ones." 

That he certainly had Mary Hogarth in his mind 
when he wrote of the death of Little N ell in The Old 
Curiosity Shop is plain from his own references to 
that incident. Writing in anticipation of the chap- 
ter in which the death is to be described he says : 

. . . this part of the story is not to be galloped over, 
I can tell you. I think it will come famously — but 
I am the wretchedest of the wretched. It casts the 
most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much 
as I can do to keepmoving at all. I tremble to ap- 
proach the place a great deal more than Kit ; a 
great deal more than Mr. Garland ; a great deal 
more than the S ingle Gentleman. I shan't recover 
it for along time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. 
It is such a very painful thing to me that I really 
cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed 
afresh when I only think of the way of doing it : 
what the actual doing it will be,Godknows. Ican't 
preach to myself the schoolmaster's consolation, 
though I try. Dear Mary died yesterday when I 
think of this sad story. 

And, five days later, the deed done, he writes 
73 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

that he had " resolved to try and do something 
which might be read by people about whom death 
had been, with a softened feeling, and with con- 
solation." And certainly he has this justification 
that, among the more unsophisticated of his read- 
ers, he succeeded in his endeavour. 

But there is no purpose to be achieved in en- 
larging unduly upon this theme, now that the 
identity of Mary Hogarth with Rose May lie, 
Little Nell, and a whole train of similar characters 
has been established. Skipping the intervening 
books, all of which are hauntedmore or lessbythe 
ghost of Mary Hogarth, reference need only be 
made, I think, to the book in which it is said that 
her sister, Georgina Hogarth, takes her place. 

In the Agnes Wickfield of David Copperfield 
we have her apotheosis: the apotheosis of the 
female prig and bore. This pale feeble figment 
whom he apostrophises thus : "Oh, Agnes, oh my 
soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life 
indeed; so may I , when Realities are melting from 
me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find 
thee near me, pointing upward ! " this bloodless 
creature, who never told her love, but let conceal- 
ment, like a worm in the bud, prey on her damask 
cheek ; this pale shadow of an outworn ideal, 
"pointing ever upward," is the last word in insi- 
pidity. Fortunately she was not sufficiently alive 
to die in the book. But — which is even more for- 
tunate — neither was she sufficiently alive to sur- 

74 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

vive the interval between that book and Dickens' 
next. Ada Clare oi Bleak House is indeed a poor 
thing ; butscratch herand she does seemtobleed 
a sort of thin milky fluid ; and Lucy Manette of 
A Tale of Two Cities, on one occasion at least, 
shows distinct signs of animation. 

Butthe influence of Mary Hogarth upon Dick- 
ens' art made itself felt in other directions. We 
haveseenhow it inspired his ideal of womanhood, 
and how it stultified his genius by warping his 
conception of the Eternal Feminine. Because of 
that youthful illusion which wove a spell about 
his heroines as Harlequin with his magic wand 
weaves a spell about poor Columbine andchanges 
her into a pantomime fairy, all glitter and pose ; 
because of this perversion of his innate sense 
of proportion, Dickens remained for the greater 
part of his life blind to the better part of woman's 
nature : that better part which makes her a help- 
meet fit for man, an equal partner in his joys and 
sorrows, his lordly lusts and slavish weaknesses, 
his proud ambitions and his secret sins, a sympa- 
thetic companion and good comrade rather than 
a guardian angel. And the mischief did not end 
there. Having conceived his perfect woman he 
must needs conceive a perfect man to match her 
and mate with her. H e seems to have argued that 
if such radiant creatures as Mary Hogarth were, 
as he expressed it, "made for Home and fireside 
75 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

peace and happiness," it behove him to evolve an 
appropriate demi-god to share that rarefied at- 
mosphere with her. The heroine must have her 
hero, fashioned of the same ethereal stuff. And 
so he cast about him for some high-falutin' male 
upon whom to found his ideal man. 

We do not know why he should have hit upon 
his brother-in-law, Henry Burnett. Weknowvery 
HttleofMr. Burnett beyondthat hemarried Dick- 
ens' sister Fanny, and that he was a dissenter. Yet 
he was commonly accepted by Dickens' intimates 
as the original of Nicholas Nickleby ; and if of 
Nicholas Nickleby why not the original also of 
Harry Maylie, Edward Chester, Tom Pinch, Wal- 
ter Gay, and the rest of those walking gentlemen 
whoalljinmoments of acute crisis, fell into Nicho- 
las Nickleby 's offensive habit of indulging in wild 
heroics of the ' ' Whence- will-come-curses-at-your- 
command?" brand. Still it is hard to believe that 
any young man of this type ever existed — even in 
those stilted times — except as a gorgeous figment 
ofa rawyoungnovelist's imagination, Thetruthis, 
I think, that Dickens, in thefever and rush of over- 
production, only too readily accepted certain sta- 
gey conventions of melodrama in lieu of the real 
stuff of life. He had not yet arrived at that stage 
of mental development which instinctively mis- 
trusts the grandiose and is very much more inclin- 
ed to seek for romance by the wayside than in the 
limelight. 

76 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

And yet Dickens was at all times so eager 
to justify the extravagances and excesses into 
which his buoyant fancy did so often betray him 
that even in the depiction of his preposterous her- 
oes he must draw from some living model that 
he could point to as the prototype of his most im- 
probable character. So, it may be that he copied 
the features, the manner, the style and the tone 
of his brother-in-law, and in the ardour of crea- 
tion lost sight of the real man. Then, the puppet 
that he had fashioned out of that incongruous 
material becoming to him more real than the 
actual figure upon whom it was founded, he had 
breathed into it some semblance of life, had in- 
vested it with strange bombastic qualities lack- 
ing in the model, and at last got its machinery to 
work, if a little awkwardly and jerkily. Inevitab- 
ly an automaton resulted. But Dickens loved the 
automaton as children love their dolls. 1 1 matter- 
ed nothing to him that it was with his own voice 
the automaton spoke ; that its every movement 
was imparted to it by his own hands, that no- 
thing changed it, and that nothing came out of 
it, except sawdust : to him it was real and vital, 
not so much a speaking likeness of the man upon 
whom it was modelled as the man himself, a little 
sublimated, translated from the commonplace 
atmosphere of everyday into the glamorous twi- 
light of romance. 

There is no doubt that Dickens thought to pay 
77 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

his brother-in-law a handsome compliment by 
turning him to suchqueer uses. He liked Burnett 
and continued to like him, even after he had shed 
some illusions abouthim. Rewrites to Forster in 
May 1 848telling him that Mrs. Burnett(hissister 
Fanny) is dangerously ill. And two months later 
he writes again : 

A change took place In poor Fanny, about the 
middle of the day yesterday, which took me out 
there last night. Her cough suddenly ceased al- 
most, and, strange to say, she immediately became 
aware of her hopeless state ; to which she resign- 
ed herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with 
extraordinary sweetness and constancy. ... I 
had a long interview with her to-day alone. . . . 
I asked her whether she had any care or anxiety 
in the world. She said no, none. It was hard to 
die at such a time, but . . . Burnett had always 
been very good to her; they had neverquarrelled; 
she was sorry to think of his going back to such 
a lonely home ; and was distressed about her chil- 
dren, but not painfully so. . . . Her husband be- 
ing young, she said, and her children infants, she 
could not help thinking sometimes that it would 
be very long in the course of nature before they 
were reunited. . . . 

All that we know of Mr- Henry Burnett is con- 
tained in that brief reference to him. The curtain 
rises and falls on that sad vision of the husband 

78 



MISS MARY HOGARTH 

and the brother drawn together by a common sor- 
row, revealing themselves to one another for the 
first time, perhaps. At any rate it is significant 
that in his next ho6k,David Copperfield, Dickens 
definitely abandons his old banal convention of 
the stereotyped hero of melodrama. His new 
hero David — in his childhood, boyhood, youth, 
and early manhood — has an air of authenticity. 
We are interested in him, as we have never been 
interested in any of his predecessors. It is as if 
Dickens, seeing Burnett for the first time as he 
really was, sees also that he is a man very like 
other men, very like Dickens himself, ^'litkis — 
this homely, kindly, simple, companionable man 
— this man who is so much like me — if this is a 
hero," says Dickens in effect, " then /have been 
a sort of hero all my life without knowing it." 
And forthwith he proceeded to evolve his next 
hero out of his own inner consciousness. 




JUDGE GAZALEE 
"Justice Stareleigh" 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

SOME PICKWICKIANS I 

IT WAS IN 1836 THAT MR. HALL (OF 
Messrs. Chapman and Hall) approached the 
young author of Sketches by Boz with a project 
for a humorous serial, to be published in monthly 
parts. Dickens himself has described what passed 
at this momentous interview. 

The idea propounded to me (he says) was that 
the monthly something should be a vehicle for cer- 
tain plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour ; and 
there was a notion, either on the part of that ad- 
mirable humorous artist, or of my visitor, that a 
NiMROD Club, the members of which were to go 
out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting 
themselves into difficulties through their want of 
dexterity, would be the best means of introducing 
these. I objected, on consideration, that although 
born and partly bred in the country, I was no great 
sportsman, except in regard to all kinds of loco- 
motion ; that the idea was not novel, and had al- 
ready been much used; that it would be infinitely 
better for the plates to arise naturally out of the 
text ; and that I would like to take my own way, 
with a freer range of English scenes and people, 
and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any 
case, whatever course I might prescribe to myself 
atstarting. My viewsbeing deferred to, I thought 
of Mr. Pickwick and wrote the first number, from 
83 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the proof-sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his 
drawing of the club and his happy portrait of its 
founder, I connected Mr. Pickwick with a club 
because of the original suggestion, and I put in 
Mr. Winkle expressly for the use of Mr. Seymour. 

Dickens wrotethus, thirteen years later, inreply 
to some foolish statements made by members of 
Mr. Seymour's family in which they claimed that 
it was the artist and not the author who had been 
responsible for the creation of the Pickwick Club. 
Mr. Hall was dead when this controversy arose; 
but Mr. Chapman " clearly recollected his part- 
ner's account of the interview, and confirmed every 
part of it . . . with one exception. In giving Mr. 
Seymour credit for the figure by which all the 
habitable globe knows Mr. Pickwick, and which 
certainlyat theoutsethelpedto make him a reality, 
it had given the artist too much. The reader will 
hardly be so startled as I was (says Forster in his 
Life) on coming to the closing line of Mr. Chap- 
man's confirmatory letter. * As this letter is to b« 
historical, I may as well claim what little belongs 
to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickj 
wick. Seymour's first sketch was of a long thiif 
man. The present immortal one he made from 
my description of a friend of mine at Richmond — 
afat old beau who would wear, in spiteof theladies' 
protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name 
was J ohniFoster.' " 1 1 

84 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

The name, Pickwick, Dickens took from that 
of a celebrated coach-proprietor, Moses Pickwick, 
of Bath. This Mr. Pickwick was also the landlord 
of the White Hart Hotel in Bath, which stood 
"opposite the great Pump Room, where the wait- 
ers, from their costume, might be mistaken for 
Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion 
by behaving themselves so much better." ^ "The 
White Hart flourished in Stall Street, and until 
1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters 
wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the 
women-servants donned neat muslin caps. The 
old coaching inn no longer exists, and its site is 
indicated by theGrand Pump Room Hotel, the or- 
iginal carved sign of a white hart being preserved 
and still used over the door of an inn of the same 
name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath." 

Thus we see that in Pickwick Papers Dickens 
did not scruple to avail himself of the assistance 
that any handy ready-made material might afford 
him. The truth was, of course, that he began by 
regarding this comic serial as a mere job — just as 
his Life of Grimaldi was a job ; that he entered 
upon hispartof theenterprise lightheartedly, with 
no serious artistic purpose, his sole aim being to 
[ amuse the many-headed and thus justify his pub- 
■ lishers' faith inhim. He borrowed names, he bor- 
rowed personalities, he borrowed backgrounds, 
I he accepted certain suggestions : and this was all 
* The Dickens Country^ by F. G. Kitton. 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

quitelegitimate. Butit haslately been said, rather 
spitefully, that he also borrowed — and this, if true, 
would be hardly as defensible — from at least one 
of his contemporaries. Let us examine into the 
truth of this charge. 

II 

In May, 1822, Edmund Kean appeared at the 
Drury Lane Theatre as Cardinal 'WoXst.ym Henry 
VIII. In those spacious days an entire programme 
did not consist merely of three short acts, begin- 
ning at nine o'clock and lasting, with intervals, 
until eleven o'clock, as it does now sometimes. 
Theatrical managers offered far more generous 
fare to their patrons in the early nineteenth cen- 
tury. Tragedy, melodrama, comedy, and farce 
were often represented in the course of one even- 
ing's entertainment. And so it was at Drury Lane 
in May, 1822. 

Henry VIII. was followed by The Boar din 
House, an uproarious farce of the broadest and' 
most rollicking kind, of which, however, nothingis 
remembered save one character. This character, 
bearing the nameof S imon Spatterdash, was origi-| 1 
nallyplayed by a forgotten actor, Knight. Knight 
doesnot seem to have scored any very notable suc- 
cess in the part ; but, some years later, the farce was 
revived atthe Surrey Theatre,andthecharacterof 
Simon Spatterdash was then made hugely popu- 
lar by another comedian named Sam Vale. It is 
claimed that this SamVale was the original of Sam 

86 



le 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

WelIer,andthatthename"Weller"wassuggested 
by Vale ; but this at least isunlikely since weknow 
that the Dickens family once employed a nurse 
named Mary Weller. Ithasalsobeenclaimed that 
he invented what we know now as Wellerisms. 
And he certainly did give off a good number pf 
those quaint sayings. H ere are a few of his best ; 
anditmustbeadmittedthatthey are, someof them, 
quite as good as Dickens' own. 

I know the world, as the monkey said when he 

cut off his tail. 
I am down upon you, as the extinguisher said to 

the rushlight. 
Let everyone take care of himself, as the jackass 

said when he danced among the chickens. 
Come on, as the man said to the tight boot. 
I am turned soger, as the lobster said when he 

popped his head out of the boiler. 
I am all of a perspiration, as the mutton-chop said 

to the gridiron. 

But to whomsoever the creditof inventing Wel- 
lerisms is due it is certainly not due to Sam Vale, 
nor to the author of The Boarding House. Walter 
Scotthad discovered the peculiar virtue of a Wel- 
lerism as long before as 1 8 1 8. In Rob Roy ^ written 
in that year, Andrew Fairservice says : " Ower 
mony maisters — asthepaddocksaid totheharrow 
when every tooth gae her a tig." And in Kenil- 
worth, published three years later, Michael Lam- 
bourne says : '* The hope of bettering myself, to 
(87 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

be sure, as the old woman said when she leaped 
over the bridge at Kingston." 

Moreover there was a certain periodical entitled 
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, Instruc- 
tion, &e., published weekly at twopence, in which 
appeared, on May 21,1823, mostofthe Wellerisms 
uttered and popularised by Sam Vale, and several 
more besides. 

And finally, to emphasise the dubiety of this 
vexed question, we find Longfellow, in The Span- 
ish Student, published in 1 840, just after Pickwick 
Papers had finished its course, putting similar say- 
ings into the mouth of the man-servant, Chispa. 
Says Chispa : 

Peace be with you, as the ass said to the cabbages. 
And a good beginning of the week it is, as he said who 

was hanged on Monday morning. 
And so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox. 

From these instances, then, it will be seen that 
this kind of jesting was the commonestform of cur- 
rent wit during the first part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. For there are fashions in humourasin most 
other things. Just now the mode is to affect the 
Yankee idiom and a Yankee accent, because it is 
so much easier to be funny in American. Fifteen, 
twenty, twenty-five years ago, we all talked epi- 
gram and paradox. A little earlier there was a 
plague of puns. And before then practical joking 
was rife. Sowemight go back, skipping the Dick- 
ens period, to the coarse heavy buffoonery that pre- 

88 




SAM VALE 

"Sam Weller" 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

ceded his gaiety of highspirits, to the stilted witof 
the Addison period, to the lewdnessof the Wych- 
erley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar school, 
to the foul greasy japes of Dekker and his filthy 
tribe, and at last to the sturdy hearty bawdiness 
of the Elizabethans. 

It hadhappened that Wellerisms were invogue 
at the time when Dickens began to write; and so 
of course he had to try his hand at them, like any 
other smart young man. For it is to be borne in 
mind that Dickens was,inall salient aspectsof his 
character at least, essentially aman who belonged 
to hisown period. He reflected the ideaand opin- 
ions, the tastes and the foibles, the prejudices and 
the prepossessions of the moment to a most re- 
markable degree. He did thisconsistently,in his 
work, passing from phase to phase of social deve- 
lopment as his art grew and matured, and so pre- 
senting us with a series of reviews of the manners 
and customs, not only in dress and habits but in 
thought and feeling, of the half-century during 
which he lived and of which he wrote. 

The delicate art of Great Expectations (which 
may be accounted his lastworthybook) is in asdi- 
rectcontrasttothehappy-go-luckymethodsofthe 
PickwickPapersd^sih^ railway train of the Seven- 
ties was to the old postchaise. The only real dis- 
tinction between Dickens and hiscontemporaries 
consists in that instinctive faculty of selection 
which does always stamp even his most haphaz- 
89 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

ard and seemingly casual work with the hall-mark 
of genius. 

I think it isoftentoo lightly assumed that Dick- 
ens was very ill-acquainted with the work of his im- 
mediate predecessors and contemporaries in the 
higher walks of literature; though, beyond ques- 
tion, there was never anything of the mere book- 
man about him at any time. And probably, in his 
early days, he knew surprisingly little of the great 
poets and philosophers who had attained their apo- 
gee when he was only just emerging from his swad- 
dling-clothes. And yet, despitethis limitation, he 
had as I say an instinctive faculty of selection that 
saved him from the very pitfalls into which the 
mere academic critic would say that he was bound 
to fall. This faculty saved him from the thin fla- 
vourless mode of the pun. It saved him from the 
brutal rough-and-tumble of the practical j oke. 1 1 
saved him from the fustian and bombast of the mid- | 
Victorian school of fiction, as exemplified in Bui- ■ 
wer Lytton. It saved him from coarseness and 
grossnessandcrudenessinthemidstofgrotesque- 
rie and eccentricity. Itdidnotsavehiminhisyouth || 
from the influence of the prevalent Wellerism; and 
for this good reason : that he did not need to be 
saved from a form of humoursorichin possibilities 
to one of his quick fancy and inimitable drollery. 
H elifted the Wellerism out of the gutter as S hake- 
speare VihediheC/ironulesoi Holinshedoutofthe 
dust — to breathe into them the breath of life. H e 

90 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

didwhat every triumphant genius has done — and 
been carped at for doing; he took an ugly shapeless 
lump of clay and fashioned it into form and come- 
liness. I have seen it gravely stated that Dickens 
owed his first great inspiration to Sam Vale, the 
comic actor of the Surrey Theatre. It would be as 
true to say that Sam Vale invented the Cockney. 
Whereas we know that the Cockney invented 
himself. And so likewise did Dickens. 

Ill 

But apart from these very doubtful prototypes 
of Mr. Pickwick himself and Sam Weller — and 
one other exception — it is fairly well established 
that Pickwick Papers does contain several auth- 
entic portraits, whimsically, and in one case cruelly, 
caricatured. 

To speak of old Tony Weller, the other excep- 
tion, first. 

Mrs. Lynn Linton declared, in that tone of 
settled conviction for which she was ever remark- 
able, as well in small things as in great, that " Old 
Weller was a real person and we knew him. He 
was ' Old Chumley ' in the flesh and drove the stage 
daily from London to Rochester and back again 
. . . a good-natured, red-faced old fellow." 

But it is also claimed that the real original of 
Tony Weller was one Cole, driver of the "Shan- 
non" coach between London and Ipswich. A few 
quaint sayings are attributed to Cole. Onone occa- 
91 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

sioii he was asked about an old companion of his 
named Stedman, and replied : " Stedman ? Law 
bless you, sir ; he's been dead this many a year. 
Leastways, if he ain't, they'veusedhim werry bad, 
for they've buried him ! " Which is quite in the 
Tony Weller vein. 

Butthen thefashion of speech, the slow dry wit, 
the manner, and the outward appearance of the old 
stage-coach-driver would very fitly haveapplied to 
some of the old London bus-drivers of not so many 
years ago. He was a '* stout, red-faced, elderly man 
. . . smoking with great vehemence, but between 
every half-dozen puffs he took his pipe from his 
mouth, and looked first at Mr. Weller and then at 
Mr. Pickwick. Then, he would bury in a quart pot 
as much of his countenance as the dimensions of 
the quart pot admitted of its receiving, and take 
another look at Sam and Mr. Pickwick. Then he 
would take another half-dozen puffs with an air of 
profound meditation and look at them again. At 
last the stout man, putting up his legs on the seat, 
began to puff at his pipe without leaving off at all, 
and to stare through the smoke at the new-comers 
as if he had made up his mind to see the most he 
could of them." His swaddlings in layer on layer 
of shawls and wraps and rugs, his hoarse voice, 
" like some strange effort of ventriloquism," and 
his habitofphilosophisingat great length on things 
ingeneral: all these are peculiarities thatoldTony 
Weller shared with several bus-drivers of my ac- 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

quaintance, besidewhom I havesatupon the box- 
seat, and to whose discourse I have listened as to 
the words of anoracle.onmanylongcoldjourneys 
in the Eighties. IthinkthatTonyWellerwasjust 
a good sample of Dickens' skill, already referred 
to, in summing up all the variations from one well- 
known national type in one colossal archetype ; 
and that is all. 

But elsewhere in Pickwick there can be little 
doubt that Dickens drew from the actual living 
model. 

Serjeant Buzfuz, for instance, really existed in 
the person of Serjeant Bompas, whose son is the 
eminent K.C. still living. Skimpinmayverylikely 
have been Wilkins; and Snubbin, Arabin, both 
of themwell-knowncounsel intheirday. Of Snub- 
bin, who may pose as a specimen barrister of that 
time, and of whom we are given a full-length por- 
trait, we are told that he 

was a lantern-faced, sallow-complexioned man, of 
about five-and-forty, or — as the novels say — he 
might have been fifty. He had that dull-looking 
boiled eye which is often to be seen in the heads 
of people who have applied themselves during 
many years to a weary and laborious course of 
study ; and which would have been sufficient, 
without the additional eyeglass which dangled 
from a broad black ribbon round his neck, to warn 
a stranger that he was very near-sighted. His hair 
93 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

was thin and weak, which was partly attributable 
to his never having devoted much time to its ar- 
rangement, and partly to his having worn for five- 
and-twenty years the forensic wig which hung on 
a block beside him. The marks of hair-powder on 
his coat-collar, and the ill- washed and worse tied 
white neckerchief roundhisthroat, showed thathe 
had notfoundleisuresinceheleftthecourt tomake 
any alteration in his dress : while theslovenly style 
of the remainder of his costume warranted the in- 
ference that his personal appearance would not 
have been very much improved if he had. Books of 
practice, heaps of papers, and opened letters, were 
scattered over the table, without any attempt at 
order or arrangement ; the furniture of the room 
was old and rickety ; the doors of the bookcase 
were rotting in their hinges ; the dust flew out of] 
the carpet in little clouds at every step; the blinds 
were yellow with age and dirt; the state of every- 
thing in the room showed, with a clearness not to 
be mistaken, that Mr. Serjeant Snubbin was far 
too much occupied with his professional pursuits || 
to take any great heed or regard of his personal 
comforts. 

There are slovenly barristers nowadays ; but 
none in general practice quite so careless of their 
person and surroundings, I should say. But that 
their methods have not greatly changed, in spite 
of the changes in their appearance, Mr. Fitz- 

94 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

gerald points out in the following passage in his 
book, Bozland: 

Notlongsince,inabreachofpromise casein Mr. 
Justice Lawrence's Court, the late Serjeant Buz- 
fuz reappeared in the flesh, and began his speech by 
declaring that "not merely in 'the whole course of 
his professional experience, but never at anytime, 
had facts more painful been brought before a jury. 
The plaintiff, gentleman, the plaintiff was a young 
lady, the daughter of a gentleman deceased, who 
was at one time in the War Office. She lived with 
her mother and her two sisters, Kate and Jessie, in 
the peaceful and innocent atmosphere of a small 
preparatory school at Thornton Heath. Gentle- 
men," Mr. went on, in tender accents, " she 

was ayounggirl ; she knew nothing of London life ; 
she had been delicately and tenderly nurtured by 
a loving mother, and had lived a quiet country life 
athome, beloved of her two younger sisters. Vir- 
tuous, poor — but, gentlemen, though poor, happy 
— knowingnothingand suspecting nothingof evil 
and deceit. Gentlemen, she got in the train for 
London Bridge, not knowing thatin the same car- 
riage was a person whom, for brevity, I will call 
a man! . . ." 

Mr. Justice Stareleigh was in real life Mr. Jus- 
tice Gazalee, of whom we have thisportrait, which 
is said to resemble the original closely : "a most 
95 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

particularly short man, and so fat that he seemed 
all face and waistcoat. He rolled in, upon two little 
turnedlegs,and having bobbed gravely to the bar, 
who bobbed gravely to him, put his little legs un- 
derneath his table, and his little three-cornered hat 
upon it; and when Mr. Justice Stareleighhaddone 
this, all you could see of him was two queer little 
eyes, one broad pink face, and somewhere about 
half of a big and very comical-looking wig. 

One other lawyer in Pickwick Papers, Mr. 
Perker,issaid to have been founded on Mr. Ellis, 
of Blackmoreand Ellis, solictors, for whom Dick- 
ens worked in his youth as a clerk. 

Of the other characters there remains Mr. Dow- 
ler, * 'a stern-eyed man of about five-and-forty, who 
had a bald and glossy forehead, with a good deal 
of blackhair at thesides and back of his head, and 
large black whiskers," who had "a fierce and per- 
emptory air, which was very dignified," and who 
"hummeda tunein a manner whichseemed to say |l 
that he rather suspected someone wanted to take 
advantage of him,butit wouldn'tdo." Thisissaid 
to be an excellent description of Dickens' bio- 
grapher, John Forster ; but, for certain reasons to 
be mentioned later on, this seems doubtful. Then 
there are Doctor Slammer who bore a colourable 
resemblance to Dickens' uncle Dr. Lamert; Mrs. 
Leo Hunter, a recognizable caricature of the 

96 




THE HONOURABLE MISS MONCKTON 
"Mrs Leo Hunter" 



SOME PICKWICKIANS 

Honorable Miss Monckton (afterwards Lady- 
Cook) ; the Fat Boy who, in real life, was "James 
Budden, and whose father kept the Red Lion Inn 
at the corner of High Street and Military Road, 
Chatham, where the lad's remarkable obesity at- 
tracted general attention;" and, lastly, Mr. Pott. 

Mr. Pott, editor of the Eatanswill Gazette, was 
unmistakably founded on Lord Brougham. His 
original description in a draft number of Pick- 
wick Papers might have been a description of the 
statesman himself. This was afterwards toned 
down a little ; but even so the likeness was in- 
stantly recognisable to Dickens' contemporaries. 
"... a tall, thin man, with a sandy-coloured head 
inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn 
importance was blended with a look of unfathom- 
able profundity. He was dressed in a long brown 
surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat, and drab 
trousers. A double eyeglass dangled at his waist- 
coat; and on his head he wore averylow-crowned 
hat with a broad brim." And the personality of 
Mr. Pott bore, in some of its most salient pecu- 
liarities, a grotesque resemblance to that of the 
great Whig chancellor. 

No stronger and stranger a figure than his 
(says Mr. Justin McCarthy in A History of 
Our Own Times') is described in the modern 
history of England. . . . He might have been 
described as one possessed by a very demon of 
work. His physical strength never gave way. 
97 G 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

His high spirits never deserted him. His self- 
confidence was boundless. He thought he knew 
everything and could do everything better than 
any other man. He delighted in giving evid- 
ence that he understood the business of the 
specialist better than the specialist himself. His 
vanity was overweening, and made him ridicu- 
lous almost as often and as much as his genius 
made him admired. The comic literature of more 
than a generation had no subject more fruitful 
than the vanity and restlessness of Lord Broug- 
ham. ... He was not an orator of the highest 
class . . . his style was too diffuse and sometimes 
too uncouth . . . his action was wild, and some- 
times even furious ; his gestures were singularly 
ungraceful; his manners were grotesque. . . . 
Brougham's was an excitable and self-assertive 
nature . . . his personal vanity was immense . . . 
his eccentricities and his almost savage temper 
made him intolerable. . . ." 

This from an admirer ! 

Dickens, in his reporting days, must often have 
watched and listened to Lord Brougham ; and 
somehow he seems to have conceived a violent 
antipathy toward him. But in that cruel carica- 
ture of the statesman in the absurd person of Pott 
we have the only instance of his ever gratifying 
a personal dislike by putting his victim in the 
pillory. 

94 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
\BOUT SQUEERS &^ MR. FANG 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

ABOUT SQUEERS AND MR. FANG 

DICKENS NEVER AGAIN GRATIFIED 
a personal dislike by pillorying the object of his 
aversion; but he did great social service in pillory- 
ing the figureheads of systems and the upholders 
and exponents of laws of which he disapproved. 
I think he rejoiced in his power to do this ; and in 
the consciousness of his power and in the exuber- 
ance of his rejoicing it maybe that he was at times 
a little indiscriminate, a little too emphatic, a little 
unjust. 

But . . . try to realise the position that this 
young man of twenty-four held in 1836. Try to 
realise how his lightest word was quoted and ac- 
claimed as wisdom by not only the scanty reading 
public of that illiterate time, but also by those who 
could not read, and so had to have his writings 
read to them. As Forster says of the reception of 
Pickwick Paper's. 

Of what the reception of the book had been up to 
this time, and of the popularity Dickens had won 
as its author, this also will be the proper place to 
speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of 
everything unreal or factitious in the causes that 
contributed to it, it is unexampled in literature* 
Here was a series of sketches, without the pret- 
ence to such interest as attends a well-constructed 

lOI 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Story; put forth in a form apparently ephemeral as 
its purpose; havingnone that seemed higher than 
to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with 
help from acomicartist; and after four orfiveparts 
had appeared, without newspaper notice or puff- 
ing, and itself not subserving in the public any- 
thingfalse or unworthy, it spranginto a popularity 
that each part carried higher and higher, until 
people at this time talked of nothing else, trades- 
men recommended their goods by using its name, 
and its sale, outstripping at a bound that of all the 
most famous books of the century, had reached 
to an almost fabulous number. Of part one, the 
binder prepared four hundred ; and of part fif- 
teen, his order was for more than forty thousand. 
Every class, the high equally with the low, were 
attracted to it. The charm of its gaiety and gooc 
humour, its inexhaustible fun, its riotous overflow 
of animal spirits, its brightness and keenness o 
observation, and above all, the incomparable ease 
of its many varieties of enjoyment, fascinatec 
everybody. Judges on the bench and boys in the 
street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, 
those who were entering life and those who were 
quitting it, alike found it to be irresistible. " An 
archdeacon," wrote Mr.Carlyle . . . "with his own 
venerable lips, repeated to me the other night, a 
strange profane story : of a solemn clergyman 
who had been administering ghostly consolation 
to a sick person ; having finished, satisfactorily 

102 



ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 

as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard 
the sick person ejaculate: 'Well, thank Godi, Pick- 
wick will be out in ten days anyway ! ' " 

Try to realise how this consciousness of power 
over the minds and hearts of the British public 
must have intoxicated the mere youth that Dick- 
ens was then, and wonder rather that he preserved 
so much of his level-headedness in the whirlwind 
of applause that surged about him, than that, oc- 
casionally, he was betrayed into any slightabuse 
of his power. 

One likes — it is human ! — to bring these great 
ones down to earth. One likes to feel one's kin- 
ship withthem,even in unworthy things. But one 
does not like, and one finds no difficulty in utterly 
disbelieving, the story that because, when Dick- 
ens and Mr. Hablot Browne went down to the 
neighbourhood of Barnard Castle to interview 
the notorious Yorkshire schoolmaster, William 
Shaw, they were received " with extreme hau- 
teur," Dickens took his revenge for that slight by 
lampooning him as Squeers. The whole story is 
rendered the more improbable by the assertion 
that " Phiz " (Halbot Browne) drew an instantly 
recognisable portrait of Shaw on his thumbnail. 

Shaw lacked an eye. A man of the same name 
and address had been twice tried, sixteen years 
before the publication of Nickleby, for atrocities 
similar tothose describedin theaccountof Dothe- 
103 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

boys Hall. But, according to Shaw's old pupils, 
he was quite a nice man, really. 
And yet . . . Dickens. 



1 



^'' . . . had gone down provided with some ficti- 
tious letters of introduction, which his friend Nit- 
ton had prepared — "a pious fraud" he calls it. 
He was supposed to be looking for a suitable 
school wherein to place a widow's child. . . . 
Four miles away was Barnard Castle, which was 
to be his real hunting-ground. " All the schools 
are round about that place." . . . The visitors 
were only however to devote a day or two days, 
Thursday and Friday, to the investigation. They 
took a post-chaise — Nicholas and Squeers drove 
over in a pony-cart . . . and arrived at a long, 
cold-looking house one storey high, with a few 
straggling outbuildings behind, and a barn and 
stable adjoining ... he (Dickens) had no time 
to waste . . . had to commence and introduce 
Squeers and his school scenes almost at once. 
. . . as to the original of Squeers. It was in 
sisted that as the house was sketched from some- 
thing existing, so also must have been the school- 
master himself. The result was unfortunate, but; 
Dickens was not in the least responsible. Squeers 
is wholly imaginary in appearance, manner, and 
diction, and for the purposes of fiction it was 
necessary that he should be so. It was enough 

* Bozland, by Percy Fitzgerald. 

lOi 




SERJEANT BOMPAS 
"Serjeant Buzfuz" 



ABOUT SQUEERS &" MR. FANG 

for the author that the notorious system existed 
of which Squeers was a type. A wretched peda- 
gogue, exercising his sordid cruelties, however 
accurately drawn from life, would be no gain to a 
fiction. The author indeed declares positively in 
his original preface that Squeers is the represen- 
tative of a class and not of an individual. The 
subject had long been in his thoughts. Even 
when a child at Rochester he had been vividly 
impressed by a lad who had come from a York- 
shire school " with a suppurated abscess " which 
his master had "ripped open with an inky pen- 
knife." . . . 

Dickens, however, was not the first to attract 
the attention of the kingdom to these horrors. 
Some sixteen years before the appearance of 
Nickleby they had all been revealed in the course 
of some actions which were tried in London in 
October, 1823, before Judge Park — ]ovi&^versus 
Shaw, and Ockerby against the same. These were 
the parents of the ill-used boy, and during the 
course of the trial many of the Squeers incidents 
were brought out. There can be no doubt that 
though Dickens did not sketch Squeers from 
Shaw, he certainly made use of many of the in- 
cidents which Shaw's case supplied. There was 
once sold by auction in London one of Shaw's 
cards, dating from near Greta Bridge, offering 
to teach young gentlemen Latin, English, arith- 
105 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

metic, geography, and geometry, and to board and 
lodge them for ;!^20 a year, which, it will be recol- 
lected, were Mr. Squeers' terms. A manuscript 
note states that Mr. Shaw " leaves the Saracen's 
Head, Snow Hill, at half-past seven o'clock, 
Thursday morning, July 25." Numbers of the 
boys, it seems, had losttheir sight througha horr- 
ible neglect. One of the Jones boys told his story, 
and it certainly seemed like poor " Graymarsh " 
or one of his fellows, telling of his treatment by 
Squeers. 

"There were nearly three hundred boys in the 
schools. We had meat three times a week, and 
on the other days potatoes and bread and cheese. 
When any gentleman came to see his children, 
Mr. Shaw used to order the boys who were with-! 
out trousers or jackets to get under the desks; we 
were sometimes without our trousers for four or 
five days while they were being mended. The 
boys washed in a long trough similar to what the 
horses drink from ; the boys had but two towels, 
and the big boys used to take advantage of the 
little boys, and get to the towels first ; we had no 
supper; we had warm water and milk for tea and 
dry bread ; we had hay and straw beds, and one 
sheet to each bed, in which four or five boys slept; 
there were about thirty beds in one room, and a 
large tub in the middle ; there were only three or 
four boys in some of the beds ; we had fleas every 
other morning (a laugh) ; I mean, we had quillst 

106 



ABOUT SQUEERS &' MR. FANG 

furnished us to flea the beds every other morning, 
and we caught a good beating if we did not fill 
the quills with fleas; we had the skimmings of the 
pot every Sunday afternoon ; the usher offered 
a penny for every maggot, and the boys found 
more than a quart full, but he did not give them 
the money (a laugh) ; we had soap every Satur- 
day afternoon, but that was always used by the 
big boys, and we had no soap but what we bought ; 
on one occasion (in October) I felt a weakness in 
my eyes, and could not write my copy; the defen- 
dant said he would beat me ; on the next day I 
could not see at all, and I told Mr. Shaw, who 
sent me, with three others, to the wash-house ; he 
always sent those boys who were ill to the wash- 
house, as he had no doctor ; those who were 
totally blind were sent into a room ; there were 
nine boys in this room totally blind ; a Mr. Ben- 
ning, a doctor, was sent for; while I remained in 
the wash-house no doctor attended us; I was in 
the room two months, and the doctor then dis- 
charged me, saying I had lost one eye; in fact, I 
was blind with both ; I went to the wash-house a 
second time, but no doctor attended me then." 

. . . Mr. Squeers, too, was in the habit of con- 
fiscating the boys' clothes, dressing them in old 
ragged garments that were too tight or too large, 
as the case might be. . . . 

The strangest part, however, was the defence, 
which was that Shaw was rather a humane and 
107 



1 

lat I 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

amiable man — "in private life "at least — and that 
it was the system of his school that was responsi 
ble, "avowedlyfoundedon themost parsimonious 
principles, with a view to suit certain parties." 
He kept five ushers, and the doctor's charge for 
one year, it was sworn, was ^loo. Mrs. Shaw 
was reported to be " tender-hearted." . . . 

The upshot of that trial was that Shaw was 
mulcted in heavy damages ; but continued his k 
school. Then, when Nickleby appeared, Dick- I 
ens' description of Dotheboys Hall revived all f 
the old odium that had attached to the Yorkshire 
schoolmaster. It was insisted that the sketch of 
Squeers was intended for Shaw. " He became 
an object of ridicule to his thoughtless, or perhaps 
spiteful, neighbours, which, together with the | 
ruin that soon after overtook him through loss of 
pupils, broke his spirit and hastened his death." 

Certainly it was a good thing that Shawshould 
die, and with him his infamous kind of school. But 
one is somehow intrigued to consider whether 
Dickens was actuated by a pure zeal for reform, 
or by the exigencies of his story, to journey so \ 
far afield and find material for those chapters on 
Mr. Squeers' establishment which gave weight to 
Nickleby and attracted to it that kind of attention \ 
which the methods of Mr. Hall Caine and Miss \ 
Marie Corelli attract to their novels. I think that \ 
there is something valid in my suspicion that 

io8 



ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 

Dickens, in his earliest period, vamped so heavily 
on the strain of public abuses in order to lam- 
poon individuals for whom he had conceived a 
dislike. But, at any rate, he abandoned this un- 
worthy habit in Nicholas Nickleby ; and thence- 
forward devoted himself not to the derision, de- 
nunciation, and destruction of individuals by 
means of gross caricature, but to the abolition of 
social evils such as his inimitable combination of 
talents in indignation and ridicule enabled his 
mind to compass. 

But there is at least one wholly authentic por- 
trait, as to the identity of which there can be no 
possible question, in one of Dickens' books. This 
is the portrait of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist. Mr. 
Fang was drawn with meticulous care from a 
living original. Dickens himself was always de- 
lighted to admit this. 

Wanting (says Forster) an Insolent and harsh 
police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original 
ready to his hand in oneof the London offices ; and 
instead of pursuing his later method of giving 
a personal appearance that should in some sort 
render difficult the identification of mental pecu- 
liarities, he was only eager to get in the whole man 
complete upon his page, figure, and face as well 
as manners and mind. He wrote accordingly 
... to Mr. Haines, a gentleman who then had 
109 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

general supervision over the police-courts for I 
the daily newspapers. " In my next number of 
Oliver Twist I must have a magistrate ; and cast- 
ing about for a magistrate whose harshness and 
insolence would render him a fit subject to be 
shown up, I have as a necessary consequence 
stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton Garden 
celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly 
well ; but as it would be necessary to describe 
his personal appearance also, I ought to have 
seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as .1 
the case may be) I have never done. In this '| 
dilemma it occurred to me that perhaps I might 
under your auspices be smuggled into the Hat- 
ton Garden office for a few moments some morn- 
ing. If you can further my object I shall be really 
very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity | 
was found; the magistrate was brought up before ' 
the novelist. . . . 

And Dickens got him down on paper, thus : 

Mr. Fangwas a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, 
middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair, 
and what he had growing on the back and sides of 
his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. 
If he were really not in the habit of drinking 
rather more than was exactly good for him, he 
might have brought an action against his counte- 
nance for libel and recovered heavy damages. 

no 



II 



ABOUT SQUEERS &^ MR. FANG 

The old gentleman (Mr. Brownlow) bowed 
respectfully ; and advancing to the magistrate's 
desk, said, suiting the action to the word : " That 
is my name and address, sir." He then with- 
drew a pace or two ; and, with another polite 
and gentlemanly inclination of the head, waited 
to be questioned. 

Now it so happened that Mr. Fang was at that 
moment perusing a leading article in a newspaper 
of the morning, adverting to some recent decision 
of his, and commending him for the three hun- 
dred and fiftieth time to the special and particular 
notice of the Secretaryof State for the Home De- 
partment. He was out of temper ; and he looked 
up with an angry scowl. 

" Who are you ? " said Mr. Fang. 

The old gentleman pointed, with some sur- 
prise, to his card. 

" Officer ! " said Mr. Fang, tossing the card con- 
temptuously away with the newspaper. " Who 
is this fellow .'* " 

*' My name, sir, "said the old gentleman, speak- 
ing /zke a gentleman , * * my name, sir, is Brownlow. 
Permit me to inquire the name of the magis- 
trate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked in- 
sult to a respectable person, under the protec- 
tion of the bench." 

Saying this, Mr. Brownlow looked round the 
office as if in search of some person who would 
afford him the required information. 
Ill 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

" Officer!" said Mr. Fang, throwing the paper 
on one side, " what's this fellow charged with ?" 

" He's not charged at all, your worship," re- 
plied the officer. " He appears against the boy, 
your worship." 

His worship knew this perfectly well; but it 
was a good annoyance, and a safe one. 

"Appears against the boy, does he?" said 
Fang, surveying Mr. Brownlow contemptuously 
from head to foot. " Swear him ! " 

" Before I am sworn I must beg to say one 
word," said Mr. Brownlow; "and that is, that 
I never, without actual experience, could have 
believed " 

" Hold your tongue, sir ! " said Mr. Fang, per- 
emptorily. 

" I will not, sir," replied the old gentle- 
man. 

" Hold your tongue this instant, or I'll have 
you turned out of the office ! " said Mr. Fang. 
" You are an insolent, impertinent fellow. How 
dare you bully a magistrate ! " 

" What! " exclaimed the old gentleman, red- 
dening. 

" Swear this person ! " said Fang to the clerk. 
" I'll not hear another word. Swear him." 

Mr.Brownlow's indignation wasgreatly roused; 
but reflecting perhaps that he might only injure 
the boy by giving vent to it, he suppressed his 
feelings and submitted to be sworn at once. 

112 




LORD BROUGHAM 

"^^• Pour' 



ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 

"Now," said Fang, "what's the charge against 
this boy ? What have you got to say, sir ? " 

"I was standing at a bookstall — " Mr. Brown- 
low began. 

" H old your tongue, sir,"said Mr. Fang. "Police- 
man! Where's the policeman ? Here, swear this 
policeman. Now, policeman, what is this ? " 

Thepoliceman, withbecominghumility, related 
howhehadtakenthecharge; how he had searched 
Oliver and found nothing on his person ; and how 
that was all he knew about it. 

"Are there any witnesses?" inquired Mr. Fang. 

" None, your worship," replied the policeman. 

Mr. Fangsat silent for some minutes, and then, 
turning round to the prosecutor, said in a tower- 
ing passion : 

" Do you mean to state what your complaint 
against this boy is,man,or doyounot? You have 
been sworn. Now if you stand there, refusing to 
give evidence, I'll punish you for disrespect to 
the bench, I will, by " 

As a direct result of that scathing indictment 
Mr. Laing was removed from the bench by the 
Home Secretary, very shortly afterward, on the 
occasion of some fresh outbreak of foul ill-temper 
and intolerable brutality. 

And whilst we are on this theme it may profit 
113 H 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

us, perhaps, to consider how it came about that 
Dickens did always show this fierce hostility to 
all sorts and conditions of lawyers. In all his 
amazing gallery of legal figures there is hardly 
one, from Messrs. Dodson and Fogg to thei 
stately Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is not in some way 
a repellent figure. I think the explanation of this 
antagonism is to be found in the circumstance 
that Dickens had once been a solicitor's clerk. 
As a solicitor's clerk it was his misfortune to be- 
come too early acquainted with the sadder, shad 
ier side of human nature ; and so he had con 
ceived one of his peculiar aversions to all that 
reminded him of that period of his career : an 
aversion which included all the people for whose 
interests and advantages the lawyer stands. 

As I have said elsewhere : if there had ever 
beenany tendency in Dickens'nature to associate 
gentlehood with the class that consists of ''gentle- 
men " and " ladies," his experiences in Mr. Mol- 
loy's and Mr. Blackmore's offices must assuredly 
have dispossessed him of it. One can hardly ap- 
preciate at its true value the goodness of the 
Have-Nots until one has traded in the badness 
of the Haves. It may be urged that a lawyer's ex- 
perience is confined solely to the worst and not 
necessarily most typical cases. That notion falls 
to the ground, however, when one remembers 
that the whole fabric of the law is built upon the 
principle of mutual mistrust. Every clause, every 

114 



ABOUT SQUEERS (Sf MR. FANG 

article, every stipulation and condition ; every 
enactment, rule, and precedent is drafted and re- 
drafted and re-drafted again, and rough-copied 
and fair-copied and fair-copied again, is settled 
and re-settled and copied and re-copied, and 
settled and yet again re-settled, and bandied from 
hand to hand and argued and squabbled and 
fought over, and finally engrossed and signed and 
sealed and delivered — in every stage of its pro- 
gress on the frank assumption that either of the 
parties concerned is entirely bent on cheating 
and robbing all or any of the others if it is barely 
possible for him to do so. The whole practice of 
the law is an exercise in cunning and chicanery. 
Truth and honour, good faith and charitableness, 
mercy and kindness : thesearethe instinctsagainst 
which it wages unremitting war. To be generous 
is to be madly foolish. To be fair-minded is to be 
quixotic. To forego the seizing of any advantage 
offered by another's innocence or ignorance or 
oversight is to write yourself down an ass. To 
voice scruples against suppressing ugly facts and 
distorting equivocal circumstances is to forfeit the 
respect of your legal advisers. To confound law 
with equity is to amuse them. 

Dickens' experience of the law was the one 
thing needed to add to the effect upon his tem- 
perament of his other varied experiences, just 
that salutary touch of hard sophistication which 
conduces to perfect clearness of vision. He knew 
115 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the law and lawyers far too well to have any re- 
spect for anything or anyone connected with itsj 
practice. 

So, throughout his whole life, he kept handy a 
whip with which to thrash the myrmidons of the 
law whensoever they seemed to him to deserve 
chastisement. 



In August 1855 ^^ wrote : 



II 



It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if 
a magistrate wilfully deliver himself of a slander- 
ous aspersion, knowing it to be unjust, he is unfit 
for his post. 

It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if a^. 
magistrate, in a fit of bile brought on by recent 
disregard of some very absurd evidence of his, so 
yield to his ill-temper as to deliver himself, in a 
sort of mad exasperation, of such slanderous as- 
persion as aforesaid, he is unfit for his post. 

It is altogether a mistake to suppose it to be 
very questionable whether, even in degraded 
Naples at this time, a magistrate could from the 
official bench insult and traduce the whole people, 
without being made to suffer for it. 

It is altogether a mistake to suppose that it 
would be becoming in some one individual out of 
between six and seven hundred national repre- 
sentatives, to be so far jealous of the honour of 
his country, as indignantly to protest against its 
being thus grossly stigmatised. 

Ill 



ABOUT SQUEERS ^f MR. FANG 

It is altogether a mistake to suppose that the 
Home Office has any association whatever with 
the general credit, the general self-respect, the 
general feeling in behalf of decent utterance, or 
the general resentment when the same is most 
discreditably violated. The Home Office is mere- 
ly an ornamental institution supported out of the 
general pocket. 

It is altogether a mistake to suppose that Mr. 
Hall (Chief Police Magistrate, sitting at Bow 
Street at that time) is anybody's business, or that 
we, the mere bone and sinew, tag rag and bobtail 
of England, have anything to do with him, but 
to pay him his salary, accept his justice, and 
meekly bow our heads to his high and mighty 
reproof. 

And again in March 1856 he wrote : 

I wonder why I feel a glow of complacency in a 
court of justice, when I hear the learned judges 
taking uncommon pains to prevent the prisoner 
from letting out the truth. If the object of the 
trial be to discover the truth, perhaps it might be 
as edifying to hear it, even from the prisoner, as 
to hear what is unquestionably not the truth from 
the prisoner's advocate. I wonder why I say, in 
a flushed and rapturous manner, that it would be 
" un-English " to examine the prisoner. I sup- 
pose that with common fairness it would be next 
to impossible to confuse him, unless he lied ; and 
117 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

if he did lie, I suppose he could hardly be brought 
to confusion too soon. Why does that word "un- 
English" always act as a spell upon me, and why 
do I suffer it to settle any question ? Twelve 
months ago it was un-English to abstain from 
throttling our soldiers. Thirty years ago it was 
un-English not to hang people up by scores ev- 
ery Monday. Sixty years ago it was un-English 
to be sober after dinner. A hundred years ago it 
was un-English not to love cock-fighting, prize- 
fightingjdog-fighting, bull-baiting, and other sav- 
ageries. Why do I submit to the word as a clin- 
cher, without asking myself whether it has anylj 
meaning ? I don't dispute that I do so, every day 
of my life; but I want to know why I do so .-* 

On the other hand, why am I meek in regard 
of really non-English sentiments, if the potent 
bugbear of that term be not called into play? 
Here is a magistrate tells me I am one of a nation 
of drunkards. All Englishmen are drunkards, is' 
the judicial bray (of Mr. Hall). Here is another 
magistrate propounding from the seat of justice) 
the stupendous nonsense that it is desirable that' 
every person who gives alms in the streets should 
be fined for that offence. This to a Christian 
people, and with the NewTestamentlying before 
him — as a sort of Dummy, I suppose, to swear 
witnesses on. Why does my so-easily-frightened 
nationality not take offence at such things } My 
hobby shies at shadows ; why does it amble so 

ii8 



ABOUT SQUEERS &> MR. FANG 

quietly past these advertising-vans of Block- 
heads seeking notoriety ? 

Why, indeed ? And why have we no modern 
Dickens to deal thus faithfully with the Shallows 
of our own time? 



CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
OTHERS 



CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

BROTHERS CHEERYBLE & OTHERS 

IN SOME RESPECTS OLIVER TWIST 
is the most remarkable of Dickens' books. The 
same might be said, perhaps, of all Dickens' 
books, since each is remarkable in some way 
which distinguishes it from every other. But of 
Oliver Twist it can be said with peculiar force, 
because in no other book did Dickens depart al- 
together from his usual style, and deal with his 
characters and his theme so entirely from the ob- 
jective point of view, as distinct from the subjec- 
tive ; and in no other book did he write of things 
and people that he had so little first-hand know- 
ledge of. 

In Oliver Twist he went for his facts behind 
the figures of a Royal Commission appointed in 
1832 to inquire into the operation of the Poor 
Laws, and the evils that had grown out of the mal- 
administration of the old Act of 1796, in spite of 
the two subsequent Vestry Acts of 18 17, which 
had been passed on the report of an earlier Com- 
mission in order to check them. This report was 
issued in 1834. As a piece of officialdom it was 
admirable. As an unconscious revelation of the 
spirit of the times it was piquant. But as an ex- 
pression of the attitude of those in authority to- 
ward the poor it was one of the most damning 
human documents ever written. Its cynicism, its 
123 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

effrontery, its callousness, its brutality, are almost I 
beyondbeliefin these somuch more humanitarian I 
days. Only a stupid and heartless rage for econ- 
omy in the outlay of money at any cost of suffer- 
ing seems to have guided the Commissioners to 
their ultimate conclusions and recommendations. 

Dickens, during the days of his Parliamentary 
reporting, had had some pretty extensive experi- 
ence of Royal Commissions. He realised that 
they were thenadays of as little avail in the ameli- 
oration of social injustices as they are now. His- 
wrath was aroused, his sympathies kindled. He" 
was aflame to right the fresh wrongs with which 
these vile enactments threatened the common 
people. So, in a white heat, regardless of the ex- 
pectations that Pickwick Papers was bound to 
have raised in the mind of his public, he cast aside 
the methods that had won him his first great suc- 
cess and wrote Oliver Twist. Out of the fire and 
fury of his indignation, but not out of his own ex- 
perience of the evils therein described, he wrotei 
that astounding book. 1 

The whole workhouse gang and its infamous 
system : Bumble, Mr. Limbkins, Mr. Gamfield, 
the gentleman in the white waistcoat, Mr. Sower- 
berry, Mrs. Corney, and the rest : in all these hej 
has created types so monstrous in their inhuman- 
ity that public opinion inevitably arose in revolt 
and insisted on the total abolition of a state of 
things that made such horrors possible. That 

124 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

state of things has not been abolished yet. Per- 
haps it never will be utterly abolished. But if the 
existence of such a state of things ever had, or 
ever could have, any justification of any kind — 
which seems hardly possible — that justification 
is to be found, at present, only in the fact that it 
moved Dickens to embark upon his first crusade 
against established iniquity, and inspired him 
with that zeal for public service which burned in 
him throuorhout the rest of his career. 

So much for the propaganda side of Oliver 
Tivist. 

As to the soundness of his other purpose, in 
depicting the infamous crew that circled around 
the Jew Fagin, I am not so well satisfied; be- 
cause to put it bluntly, he tried to depict what he 
had never seen, to describe a phase of life with 
which he was essentially unfamiliar, and so drew 
an unconvincing picture. Bill Sikes never was, 
or ever could be, a convincing type of the pro- 
fessional burglar. He is altogether too burly and 
coarse, too gross and clumsy — as a visit to any 
of our police-courts will prove to the most scep- 
tical. And in Fagin, who was probably drawn 
from a notorious criminal of that time named I key 
Solomons (of whom there will be further men- 
tion) he sacrificed an effect of authenticity to his 
passion for the picturesque — as in the case of 
Squeers. 

Neither do I agree with him that whilst " a 
125 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Massaroni in green velvet is an enchanting crea- 
ture ... a Sikes in fustian is insupportable ; " or 
that "a Mrs. Massaroni, | being a lady in short 
petticoats and a fancy dress ... a thing to imitate 
in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty 
songs . . ./a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton 
gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of. 
It is wonderful (says Dickens in his preface to 
Oliver Twisty how virtue turns from dirty stock- 
inos ; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a 
little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded 
ladies do, and becomes Romance." 

It would be wonderful if it were true. But it 
is not true, or we should none of us be so hor- 
ribly fascinated, as deaf old Mrs. Wardle was, by 
the Fat Boy's desire to make our flesh creep, or 
so ea^er to listen to the fearsome tale that he 
has to unfold. I am inclined to think that deaf 
old Mrs. Wardle was a little disappointed in the , 
Fat Boy's narrative. I have an idea that she ex- f 
pected at least a little gore, and would have been f 
vastly more thrilled if it had been a murder and 
not merely a projected elopement that the Fat 
Boy had to divulge. And I am Irresistibly per- 
suaded to this belief by the fact that in all ages ' 
and in all climes human nature has never fail- 
ed to evince a similar intense interest — morbid, 
if you like — in the most foul and revolting of 
crimes, in the most raw and crude villainy, in 
viciousness the most naked and unashamed, in 

126 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

degradation the most abject and nauseous. If 
this were not so, why should our present-day- 
editors serve up for our delectation so many more 
columns of description, when they are dealing 
with some hideous story of murder and mutila- 
tion, than when they have only to tell us how 
some polite and genteel scoundrel has by devious 
courses succeeded in evading the Bankruptcy 
Court only to land himself at last in the abyss of 
gaol? 

But at this early stage of his development 
Dickens was peculiarly susceptible — unlike most 
sanguine, ardent young men — to the influence of 
middle-class conventions : which is merely to say 
that, though he had learned to see aright, he had 
not yet learned to think aright — to think for him- 
self, that is. 

According to the accepted convention of his 
day, the thief and the prostitute, the pickpocket 
and the murderer, and all the rest of the criminal 
hoi polloi, were — to use a favourite word of that 
period — " low " ; and, being " low," they must 
needs be also dirty and violent, crapulous and ob- 
scene. A like convention ordained that alldecent 
and law-abiding people were superior, not only 
in outward seeming, but in mental capacity and 
spiritual grace, to these bestial outlaws. Dickens 
accepted both conventions andsubscribed to them 
heartily: it was all a part of his childlike inno- 
cence; with the result that all the villains in his 
127 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

earlier booksareinstantly recognisable as villains 
at first sight, whilst all his good people exhale 
an unmistakable odour of sanctity ; whereas the 
truth is, of course, that a villain's appearance of _ 
virtue is usually his best asset, and that if bad men | 
went about like blind men, with descriptive labels 
attached to them, they would never be given a 
chance to do any wrong at all ; equally is it true 
that an odour of sanctity may be assumed to 
smother the evil odour of a mind festering and 
rotting with disease. 



Thus, in Oliver Twist, ^^ have Dickens' burg- 
lars and his Nancys, his Artful Dodgers and his 
Noah Claypoles, and so on, all alike presented to 
us as beings from whom we should instinctively 
shrink in disgust ; and we have, on the other hand, 
his Brothers Cherryble presented to us as two 
cherubic saints, whom to meet only once is to ac- 
cept as embodiments of goodness, whom to know 
for but an hour is to love. j 

In his preface to Nicholas Nicklehy he says, 
after having defended his delineation of Squeers 
and his denunciation of the whole race of school- 
masters for whom the figure of Squeers stands as 
the archetype: "To turn to a more pleasant sub- 
ject, it may be right to say, that there are two 
characters in this book which are drawn from 
life. It is remarkable that what we call the world, 

128 




WILLIAM GRANT 
One ot the "Cheeryble Brothers ' 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

which is so very credulous in what professes to be 
true, is most incredulous in what professes to be 
imaginary ; and that, while, every day in real life, 
it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in 
another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very 
strongly-marked character, either good or bad, 
in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of 
probability. But those who take an interest in 
this tale will be glad to learn that the Brothers 
Cheeryble live ; that their liberal charity, their 
singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their 
unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the 
Author's brain ; but are prompting every day 
(and oftenest by stealth) some munificent and 
generous deed in that town of which they are the 
pride and honour. If I were to attempt to sum up 
the thousands of letters, from all sorts of people 
in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this 
unlucky paragraph brought down upon me, I 
should get into an arithmetical difficulty from 
which I could not easily extricate myself. Suffice 
it to say that I believe the applications for loans, 
gifts, and offices of profit, that I have been re- 
quested to forward to the originals of the Brothers 
Cheeryble (with whom I never interchanged any 
communication in my life) would have exhausted 
the combined patronage of all the Lord Chan- 
cellors since the accession of the House of Bruns- 
wick, and would have broken the Rest of the 
Bank of England. The Brothers are now dead." 
129 I 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

One might add that they were never alive. 
Even the genius of their creator could not make 
them credible, implicitly as he believed in them. 

But, in another sense, one asks : Were they 
really dead at the time when Dickens wrote the 
above words ? 

Forster says very definitely : " A friend now 
specially welcome also, was the novelist, Mr. 
Ainsworth, who shared with us incessantly for 
the three following years in the companionship 
which began at his (Dickens') house (in Devon- 
shire Terrace) ; with whom we visited . . . friends 
of art and literature in his native Manchester, 
from among whom Dickens brought away hi* 
Brothers Cheeryble." 

Mr. Kitton says : 

In a literary sense Manchester can boast o( 
. . . Dickensian associations, for here resided the 
originals of the delightful Cheeryble Brothers^ 
who (the author assures us in his preface to Nich- 
olas Nickleby) were "very slightly and imperfectly! 
sketched" from life. . . . The actual models whence 
he portrayed the Cheerybles with approximate 
accuracy were the Brothers Grant, William and! 
Daniel, merchants of Ramsbottom and Man-; 
Chester. . . . From evidence recently forthcoming 
. . . we learn that in 1838 (the year prior to the 
publication oi Nickleby) he and Forster were the 
guests of Mr. Gilbert Winter, of Stocks House, 

130 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, to whom they 
went with a letter of introduction from Harrison 
Ainsworth. It was at Stocks House that Dickens 
became acquainted with the Grants The Rev- 
erend Hume Elliott informs us that although 
William and Daniel Grant had residences in 
Manchester, they preferred to live together at 
Springside, Ramsbottom, " which they made a 
veritable home of hospitality and good works," 
and it is fair to assume that Dickens must have 
seen at their home the original of David, " the 
apoplectic butler," or ascertained from an auth- 
entic source the peculiarities of Alfred (Boot), 
who served the Grants in a like capacity and 
possessed similar idiosyncrasies. . . . The rare 
combination of the qualities of charity and hu- 
manity with sound business instincts such as are 
ascribed to the Cheeryble Brothers, was exactly 
trueof the Grants. On thedeath of William Grant, 
the elder brother, in 1842, the novelist, writing 
from Niagara Falls to his American friend, Pro- 
fessor Felton, said : " One of the noble hearts who 
sat for the Cheeryble Brothers is dead. If I had 
been in England I would certainly have gone into 
mourning for the loss of such a glorious life. His 
brother is not expected to survive him. ... I am 
told that it appears from a memorandum found 
among the papers of the deceased that in his life- 
time he gave away ;^6oo,ooo, or three million 
dollars." There is a marble tablet to the memory 
1 131 



i 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

of William Grant in Saint Andrew's Presbyterian 
Church, Ramsbottom, recording his "vigour of 
understanding, his spotless integrity of character, 
and his true benevolence of heart. ... If you are 
in poverty," the inscription continues, " grieve || 
for the loss of so good a friend ; if born to wealth 
and influence, think of the importance of such a r 
trust, and earn in like manner by a life of charit-f 
able exertion the respect and love of all who knew 
you, and the prayers and blessings of the poor." 
Honoured descendants of the two philanthropists 
are still surviving in the city which cherishes 
their memory. 

And Mr. Fitzgerald, who is equally circum- 
stantial, says : 

A portly volume of some 400 pages has been! 
written on the subject of the Cheeryble Brothers 
— whose real name was Grant — most of which is 
devoted to an accountof a Dissenting chapel with 
which they were connected, the Dundee Chapel 
it was called. The brothers were William, Daniel, 
John, and I think Charles. In their early days, 
they kept a shop at Bury St. Edmund's, but mi- 
grated to Manchester, where they became lead-| 
ing merchants. The novelist's father always held 
them out to him as a pattern to imitate. They 
were well known for their philanthropic char- 
acter. A Liverpool merchant, who came to ask 
assistance at a crisis, was given ^10,000 without 

132 






THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

any security. One of the brothers was alive in 
1855- 

This was the brother who, according to the re- 
port echoed by Dickens, was not expected to sur- 
vive hisbrother's death in 1 842. The brother who 
died in 1 842 was William Grant, of whom the fol- 
lowing passage in Nickleby is said to give an ex- 
cellent description : 

He was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted 
blue coat, made pretty large to fit easily, and 
with no particular waist; his bulky legs clothed in 
drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head pro- 
tected by a low-crowned, broad-brimmed white 
hat, such as a wealthy grazier might wear. He 
wore his coat buttoned ; and his dimpled double 
chin rested in the folds of a white neckerchief — 
not one of your stiff-starched, apoplectic cravats, 
but a good easy old-fashioned white neck-cloth 
that a man might go to bed in and be none the 
worse for. But what principally attracted the at- 
tention of Nicholas was the old gentleman's eye 
— never was such a clear, twinkling, honest, 
merry, happy eye as that. And there he stood, 
looking a little upward with one hand thrust into 
the breast of his coat, and the other playing with 
his old-fashioned gold watch-chain ; his head 
thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little 
more on one side than his head (but that was evi- 
dently accident; not his ordinary way of wearing 
133 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

it), with such a pleasant smile playing about his 
mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled 
slyness, simplicity, kindheartedness, and good- 
humour lighting up his jolly old face, that Nicho- 
las would have been content to have stood there, 
and looked at him until evening, and to have for-|' 
gotten, meanwhile, that there was such a thing as 
a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be 
met with in the whole wide world. 

Now I think the most significant sentence in| 
all the above extracts is that which mentions 
that Dickens' father had always held the Grant i 
Brothers out to his son Charles as a pattern to'| 
imitate. The time is not yet for us to consider 
Dickens' father in the character of Mr. Micaw- 
ber; but I think that these prosperous merchants 
would be just the kind of men that the John 
Dickenses of this world do always set upas heroes. 
Your incurably unsuccessful man is almost in- 
variably the warmest admirer of your successful 
man, so long as he does not come into personal 
contact with him. And so when the time came 
for the brilliant son of the poor failure to meet his 
father's ideal type in the flesh, it was natural that 
he should look at him with his father's eyes. 

Who and what were these men, these four 
Brothers Grant ? They were Scotsmen of El- 
chies. It is said that in their hot youth they 
tramped from their native place to Bury with all 

134 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

their worldly possessions tied up in a bundle. It 
is more usual for the future millionaire to descend 
upon the unfortunate country or town in which 
he is to make his millions with only half a crown 
in his pocket ; and I have always been con- 
strained to wonder if he had also a hundred 
pounds or so tied up in the tail of his shirt, since 
the crowning mystery of his career is invariably 
that sudden accession of capital which enables 
him to spring from penury into prosperity at one 
bound. It is, then, so much the more satisfactory 
to learn that the Brothers Grant brought their 
half-crowns in a bundle. It absolves them from 
that suspicion of indulging in some sharp prac- 
tices — such as robbing their masters' till or cook- 
ing his accounts — which always does lurk at the 
back of my mind whenever I read the biographies 
of self-made men. 

These young men had been graziers in Scot- 
land, and had failed as graziers. Mr. Fitzger- 
ald mentions incidentally that, before coming to 
Manchester, they had kept a shop in Bury St. Ed- 
mund's — and presumably again failed, this time 
as shopkeepers. But it is reassuring to know that, 
despite these and perhaps other early set-backs, 
they were miraculously enabled to set up as 
Woollen and Linen Drapers in their new domi- 
cile (no doubt on the contents of the bundle), and 
very soon were flourishing like the green bay 
tree : flourishing to such an extent that they could 
135 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

afford at least two residences, and could also lend t 
ten thousand pounds without security, but not 
without hope of advertisement, or that transac- 
tion would never have been made public. 

William Grant, who was obviously the chief 
moving spirit inthefirm, seemsto have beenaman 
of character. He is said to have been extremely 
witty ; and so it is a pity that the only sayings of 
his which tradition has preserved are the usual 
insolences of the lucky, boastful speculator. 

He had a pet maxim : " Good masters make 
good workmen." 

And his other good thing was said in reply to 
a remark by some one: "I believe, Mr. Gran t,you 
were very poor when you came to these parts ? " 

" Oh yes," replied William with a droll twin- 
kle of the eye — that same twinkle which Dick- 
ens had observed — " Oh yes. And if I had been 
you I should have remained poor ! " 

What the other man retorted is not on record, 
unfortunately ; but if I had been in his shoes I 
should have said : "Yes, poor but honest." 

Frankly, one does not like these Cheerybles or 
Grants. But then, as it is impossible for anyone 
to believe in them, no harm is done. And at least 
there is this beautiful aspect of their case, which is 
summed up in the surprising factthat Dickens did 
believe in them, in the simplicity of his glorious 
youth — or, rather, believed in his father's belief 
in them. He did believe — thanks to his father — 

136 




DANIEL GRANT 
One of the "Cheeryble Brothers* 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

that it is possible to be at once a millionaire and a 
humanitarian; and that it is a creditable thing for 
a man to laugh and grow fat whilst those out of 
whose labour he has made his riches do not laugh 
but oftener weep, and are mercifully saved from 
the vice of laziness by such hard work that they 
must remain of necessity thin. 

" The Brothers are now dead." 

Oh, no doubt they are dead — very dead. And 
perhaps, after all, even Dickens' dear illusions 
about them had begun to fade a little by the time 
he wrote that sentence in his preface to Nicholas 
Nickleby. It would almost seem so ; for never ag- 
ain do their like appear in any of his later work, 
although we have recognisable variations on the 
Brothers Grant in the Gradgrinds, Bounderbys, 
Merdles — the original of Merdle was the infam- 
ous John Sadlier, forger and swindler, a sort of 
Whitaker Wright — Veneerings, and so on, of his 
final embittered period. 

Our pleasure is now to dwell upon the real 
triumphs oi Nickleby : Newman Noggs and Miss 
La Creevy ; and upon those rather less likely 
characters, John Browdie and Smike: all four of 
whom are said to have been founded upon living 
prototypes. 

"My friends," wrote Sydney Smith,describing 
to Dickens the anxiety of some ladies of his ac- 
quaintance to meet him at dinner, " have not the 
137 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

smallest objection to be put into a number, but 
on the contrary would be proud of the distinction; 
and Lady Charlotte, in particular, you may marry 
to Newman Noggs." 

History does not disclose the identity of this 
Lady Charlotte; but it is sufficiently revealed that 
she was a woman of nice discrimination and ex- 
quisite taste. Newman Noggs, whom wehave all 
met in the flesh, and — if we are discerning — pitied 
with the pity that is akin to love, is one of those 
unfortunates who, having been dowered with all I 
the virtues, are cursed by the addition of one small 
vice that renders all their virtues absurd and holds 
them up for evermore to the coarse ridicule or the ■ 
stern obloquy or the silent contempt of their im- 
measurable inferiors, the cruel, the self-righteous, 
and the purblind or unthinking. 

Newman Noggs was 

a tall man of middle age, with two goggle eyes 
whereof one was a fixture, a rubicund nose, a 
cadaverous face, and a suit of clothes (if the 
term be allowable when they suited him not at 
all) much the worse for wear, very much too 
small, and placed upon such a short allowance of 
buttons that it was marvellous how he contrived 
to keep them on. . . . He gave a peculiar grunt, I 
as his custom was at the end of all disputes with I 
his master, to imply that he (Noggs) triumphed ; ' 
and (as he rarely spoke to anybody unless some- 

138 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

body spoke to him) fell into a grim silence and 
rubbed his hands slowly over each other : crack- 
ing the joints of his fingers, and squeezing them 
into all possible distortions. The incessant per- 
formance of this routine on every occasion, and 
the communication of a fixed and rigid look to 
his unaffected eye, so as to make it uniform 
with the other, and to render it impossible for 
anybody to determine where or at what he was 
looking, were two among the numerous peculi- 
arities of Mr. Noggs which struck an inexperi- 
enced observer at first sight. . . . 

"Don't cry," says Newman Noggs to Kate 
Nickleby on a certain pitiful occasion. " Don't," 
said he, gliding out of his recess and accompany- 
ing her across the hall. " Don't cry, don't cry." 
Two very large tears, by the by, were running 
down Newman's face as he spoke. 

" I see how it is," said poor Noggs, drawing 
from his pocket what seemed to be a very old 
duster, and wiping Kate's eyes with it as gently as 
if she were an infant. *' You're giving way now. 
Yes, yes ; very good. That's right ; I like that. 
It was right not to give way before him. Yes, yes ! 
Ha, ha, ha! Oh, yes. Poor thing ! " 

With these disjointed exclamations, Newman 
wiped his own eyes with the aforementioned dus- 
ter, and, limping to the street door, opened it to 
let her out. 

" Don'tcry any more," whispered Newman. " I 
139 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

shall see you soon. Ha, ha, ha! . . . Yes, yes. 
Ho, ho!" 

" God bless you, "answered Kate, hurrying out. 
*' God bless you." 

"Same to you," rejoined Newman, opening the 
door again a little way to say so. "Ha, ha, ha 1 
Ho, ho, ho!" 

And Newman Noggs opened the door once 
again to nod cheerfully, and laugh — and shut it, to 
shake his head mournfully, and cry. 

But yes, she was a woman of infinite womanli- 
ness, that unknown Lady Charlotte ! 

The real Newman Noggs was a certain New- 
man Knott, a broken-down ne'er-do-weel who 
had seen better days as a tenant-farmer. He 
used to call at irregular intervals at the office of 
Messrs. Blackmore & Ellis, during the time that 
Dickens was working for them as a clerk, for a 
weekly dole of seven shillings allowed him by 
some wealthy relative as the price of his self-im- 
molation. He was apparently of that dissolute, 
queer, eccentric type which is still common 
enough in London. Like all his kind, having dis- 
sipated his past, he was ever eager to mortage 
his future by forestalling his weekly dole. He 
used to borrow small sums from the clerks ; and 
in lieu of interest they baited him. I daresay the 
boy Dickens baited him too, for boys are all imi- 
tative as monkeys ; but, if so, he atoned hand- 

140 



I 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

somely afterward by canonising him in the ab- 
stract. 

It seems to me (for I accept the reality of New- 
man Noggs as implicity as Lady Charlotte did) 
that this excellent creature, and not the Cheery- 
bles' jackal, Tim Linkinwater — who, neverthe- 
less, was a hearty old cock — should have married 
Miss La Creevy. He would have found ample 
consolation for his wasted life on the soft, if with- 
ered, bosom of that dear good little miniature 
painter, who, living by herself, overflowing with 
aflections she had no one to enrich withal, was 
always cheerful by dint of industry and good- 
heartedness. The antic figure of that mincing 
young lady of fifty, in her preposterous yellow 
headdress recurs to the memory as one of the 
most winning in the gallery of Dickens' portraits. 
We see her, when she is disappointed in the char- 
acter of a woman she has been to visit, easing her 
mind by saying cutting things at the woman's 
expense in a soliloquy, thereby draining her heart 
of its gall ; and thereby, as she herself would have 
said, being a philosopher in her way, also illus- 
trating one of the advantages of having lived 
alone so long that she had always made a con- 
fidant of herself; was as sarcastic as she could 
be, by herself, on the subject of people who 
offended her ; pleased herself and did no harm. 

She and Newman Noggs would have made a 
most excellent match ; for they had both in excess 
141 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the highest virtue — beside which all other virtues l 
are as naught — the virtue of kindness. But she 
had, besides a certain measure of shrewdness and 
steadiness of purpose, which should have helped 
her heaven-sent consort to vindicate his man- 
hood. 

Miss La Creevy, it is said, was founded on a 
Miss Rose Emma Drummond,to whom Dickens 
sat for his portrait — and to whom she sat for 
her portrait — in 1 835. The portrait was done on 
ivory, and given to his future wife, Miss Hogarth, . 
as an engagement present. I have an idea, based •] 
upon nothing more substantial than a whimsy, 
that that miniature was rather a poor thing as art, 
and yet possessed a certain value of quaintness 
that lifted it above utter mediocrity. 

There remain of this Nickleby group only I 
Smike and John Browdie, neither of them very 
convincing figures. 

It is said, on the authority of a Mrs. Ewebank 
whose husband once kept the King's Head Hotel 
at Barnard Castle, that John Browdie had a living J 

original in one John F or S , of Broadis- 

wood, a farmer. 

In the last chapter it is told how Dickens had 
gone down to Barnard Castle provided with some 
bogus letters of introduction to inspect the York- 
shire schools. One of the persons to be victim- 
ised by this fraud was this same John F or 

S . 

142 



THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 

Not being at home when the novelist called 
upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the 
inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated 
him to advise the (figmentary) widow (whom 
Dickens had invented for the occasion) to refrain 
from sending her boy to any of those wretched 
schools "while there's a harse to hoold in a' 
Lunnon, or a goother to lie asleep in ! " The old 
coaching-house where this memorable interview 
is believed to have taken place (says Mr. Kitton 
in the passage I am now quoting) was the still 
existing Unicorn at Bowes. 



Of the last of this group, Smike, it only remains 
to say that in 1889 an absurd old person, keeping 
a toyshop at Bury St. Edmund's, claimed to be 
the original of Crummies' ideal Apothecary. He 
is described as a tall, hatchet-faced, very aged 
and decrepit gentleman ; and his claim was 
based upon the circumstance that when he was a 
boy he was sent to a school in Yorkshire by a 
wicked uncle and ran away from it. As if he were 
the only nephew that ever ran away from school! 

Moreover, this egregious old toy-seller seems 
hardly to have realised that by living to a ripe old 
age, and thus dispelling any atmosphere of pathos 
that may attach to Smike's death, he had robbed 
himself of his only possible claim upon our affec- 
tionate interest. 
143 



I 




JOHN DICKENS 

"Mr Mtcawber" 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 

RELICS FROM THE OLD 
CURIOSITY SHOP 



K 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH RELICS 
FROM THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

IN HIS NEXT BOOK AFTER NICHO- 
LAS NICKLEBY we find Dickens dipping a 
little deeper yet into the seemingly bottomless 
well of his early experiences. He was still work- 
ing at high pressure, turning from project to pro- 
ject with that restless hunger after new food for 
his genius which was one of his most amazing 
characteristics, and doing with all his might what- 
soever his hand found to do, as if it were the only 
thing to be done, with equally characteristic self- 
confidence and self-abandonment. 

The splendour of his achievements during the 
first six years of his career, during which period 
he published six immensely long books, certainly 
writing every word of five of them, besides en- 
gaging in all manner of outside tasks, editorial 
and other, is now a little dimmed by the mists of 
time ; but if we consider that not all Mr. J. M. 
Barrie's twenty-five years of labour has produced 
in mere bulk such an output of words, we get a 
little nearer perhaps to a realisation of the inex- 
haustible fecundity, the untiring industry, and 
the prodigious powers of application that would 
have made Dickens, had he been the veriest 
hack, a phenomenon of letters. Only the first 
Dumas can bear comparison with him in this 
particular regard; and Dumas, we have reason 
to suspect, kept a kind of literary factory in which 
147 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

he employed many hands for the turning out of 
romance, as if by machinery. Moreover, Duma^i 
had his materials ready-made to draw upon at ' 
will ; whereas Dickens, at any rate until this 
time, had to spin his material out of his own in- 
terior like a spider. 

The Old Curiosity Shop was begun as a mere 
sketch, done in a hurry and without any thought 
of further development. From that tentative be- 
ginning it grew spontaneously out of the exub- 
erance of its author's fancy, taking on form and 
substance as it grew, budding and sprouting lux- 
uriantly, throwing out wide branches like a tree, 
bearing abundance of sweetest flowers and rip- 
est fruit, and at last, as it were, dying of its own 
furious energy, shedding its sere and withered 
leaves in whirling gringolades, that fell ever 
slower and more slowly until they rested on the 
melancholy earth, cold and dank as fresh-turned 
graves and sodden as with a rain of tears. 

Dickens'lifewasonelongseriesof experiments. 
For it was at once his good fortune and his mis- 
fortune to serve his apprenticeship to his art in 
public. The slips and trips, the fumblings and 
stumblings, the faulty workmanship of uncon- 
genial tasks hastily scamped and left half-finished 
with all their rawness and crudeness of outline 
stark to view : these inevitable blunders and mis- 
takes, these ghastly failures that usually are per- 
petrated in secrecy, in the agony and bloody 



1 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

sweat, the tears and bitter heartbreak of solitude : 
which solitude has nevertheless its compensa- 
tions in that it hides the shame of our defeat from 
other eyes than ours, and spares us many blushes 
in the future : all these ordeals by trial of faith 
which are incidental to the greatest of careers, 
Dickens had to undergo in the full glare of that 
fierce white light which beats upon the bays of 
fame. 

And Dickens was famous before he had cut his 
wisdom teeth. The world had discovered him 
before he had discovered himself. From that 
moment in which, lightheartedly, he accepted a 
commission for a "series of sporting sketches,' 
and set him down to fulfil a business contract in a 
business-like way, and yet in a sort of careless rap- 
ture, too, born of his youth : from that moment he 
was ordained to the religion of humanity as surely 
and irrevocably as any acolyte is ordained to the 
religion of the Church. From that moment his 
foot was set upon the slippery way. But he climb- 
ed the steep toilsome ascent not alone, as the vast 
majority of his fellows have done. He climbed in 
the full light of day with multitudes of spectators 
lining his path on either hand, with the gaze of 

; countless eyes fixed intently upon him, with a 

) babble and tumult of voices applauding, encour- 
aging, triumphing in his triumph — nay, turning 
his very failures into triumphs by the din of their 

( acclaim. 

i 149 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

A spectacle for the gods ! A spectacle to bringi 
tears into the eyes and misgivings into the hearts* 
of those more staid and calm who stood aloof 
from the rabble, and to whom all such valorous 
displays of youthful daring are occasions for self- 
searching and regret. He stood forth before the 
thunderous throng, as of old the Roman gladiat- 
ors stood forth in the arena of death before their 
emperor and his glittering train of courtiers and 
satellites; but in no mood oi Ave CcBsar! We 
who are about to die salute thee ! H is form was as 
the form of a child. His face was as a child's facci 
bright and happy in the sunshine of universa 
favour. There was the unconscious grace ol 
childhood in his easy unaffected pose ; and the 
sublime graciousness of childhood in his gay ac- 
ceptance of these plaudits as his right. These 
reverend elders, these grave and wise seigneurs 
surely if they believed in him he must of sheel 
necessity believe in himself! . . . 

That, as it seems to me, was Dickens' attitudc| 
toward the world. That was why he failed so 
often, and never knew that he failed. That was 
why he failed so seldom, and never knew that he 
had attained greatness. . . . 

Fantastic, all this? Perhaps it is. A little be 
side the point } Maybe. But then, what woul 
you ? I know it is a dreadful thing to be enthusi 
astic in these bloodless days. I know that to be in 
earnest and to be carried away by your earnest- 

150 



\ 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

ness is a grievous fault, a fault never committed 
in the best society ; that to rejoice in your theme 
and to let the voice of your rejoicing rise to 
Heaven is a sin beyond say the pardon of Mr. St. 
Loe Strachey ; that to say what your heart, rather 
than your head, impels you to say, and that with- 
out regard to the formulas of the schoolmen is 
to outrage all the fair — or is it unfair ? — canons 
of art ; and that to be honest is to be indecent. 
. . . "Gentlemen," said a sportive sage, who had 
been playing leapfrog with some fellow-sages, 
or indulging in some similar flippancy; " gentle- 
men, we must be serious. Here comes a fool." 
How can one be serious in the company of Dick 
Swiveller.-* One could conceivably have been se- 
rious in the company of Newman Noggs, Dick's 
father. There was that incident of the duster. . . . 
But with this tremendous fellow, this rakehell, 
this heart-breaker, this lineal descendant of the 
hosts of Rabelais, this more blithe and gay and 
reckless young Hopeful, this child of the devil 
and happiness, chip of the old block as he is, this 
humorous dog who greets us at the very outset 
of our acquaintance with the query, breathed in a 
sigh of resignation to the drabness of an every- 
day world after an evening red : " But what . . . 
is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at 
the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friend- 
ship never moults a feather ! What is the odds so 
long as the spirit is expanded by means of rosy 
151 



! 

THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

wine, and the present moment is the least happi-k 
est of our existence ! " And again : " There is a 
proverb which talks about being merry and wise. 
There are some people who can be merry and 
can't be wise, and some who can be wise (or think 
they can) and can't be merry. I'm one of the first 
sort. If the proverb's a good 'un, I suppose it is 
better to keep to half of it than none ; at all ev- 
ents I'd rather be merry and not wise than be like 
you — neither one nor t'other." 

Frankly, it seems to me to be impossible for 
anyone not a professional tea-taster to keep a- 
straight face in the presence of this most repre- 
hensible person. So that if, as I do verily be- 
lieve, Dick Swiveller is the son and heir of New- 
man Noggs ; and if, as we are told, Newman 
Noggs was in real life Mr. Newman Knott ; and 
if Mr. Newman Knott embodied in himself only 
a suggestion of his offspring's gorgeous persona- 
lity, then I can only marvel at the stupidity, and' 
be sorry for the meanness of that unfortunate 
gentleman's relatives, and most heartily approve* 
the generosity and wisdom of Dickens' fellow-* 
clerks' conduct in pandering to that immortal 
being's carnal lusts. I 

Out of his past Dickens drew inspiration for^ 
at least three of the characters that illumine the} 
gloom of The Old Curiosity Shop. j 

There was, first of all, the Poet of Mrs. Jarley*^ 

152 




MRS COOPER 

"Little Dorrit" 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

Waxworks. Mr. Slum makes only a very brief ap- 
pearance upon the stage ; but I think he should 
be given his chance, as he belongs to a milieu 
that Dickens seems to have had a strange dis- 
taste for. He was 

... a tallish gentleman with a hook nose and 
black hair, dressed in a military surtout very 
short and tight in the sleeves, and which had once 
been frogged and braided all over, but was now 
sadly shorn of its garniture and quite threadbare 
— dressed too in ancient grey pantaloons fitting 
tight to the leg, and a pair of pumps in the winter 
of their existence. . . . He looked in at the door 
and smiled affably. Mrs. Jarley's back being then 
towards him, the military gentleman shook his 
forefinger as a sign that her myrmidons were not 
to apprise her of his presence, and stealing up 
close behind her, tapped her on the neck, and 
cried playfully " Boh ! " 

"What, Mr. Slum ! " cried the lady of the wax- 
work. ** Lor! who'd have thought of seeing you 
here!" 

"Ton my soul and honour," said Mr. Slum, 
" that's a good remark. Ton my soul and honour 
that's a wise remark. Who would have thought 
it ! . . . I came here . . . 'pon my soul and honour 
I hardly know what I came here for. It would 
puzzle me to tell you, it would by Gad. I wanted 
a little inspiration, a little freshening up, a little 
153 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

change of ideas, and — 'pon my soul and honour," 
said the military gentleman, checking himself 
and looking round the room," whatadevilish clas- 
sical thing this is ! By Gad, it's quite Minervan !" 

"It'll look well enough when it comes to be 
finished," observed Mrs. Jarley. 

" Well enough ! " said Mr. Slum. " Will you 
believe me when I say it's the delight of my life 
to have dabbled in poetry, when I think I've ex- 
ercised my pen upon this charming theme ? By 
the way — any orders ? Is there any little thing I 
can do for you ? " 

"It comes so very expensive, sir," replied Mrs. 
Jarley, "and I really don't think it does much 
good." 

" Hush ! No, no ! " returned Mr. Slum, elevat- 
inghishand. "Nofibs. I '11 not hear it. Don'tsay 
it don't do good. Don't say it. I know better ! " 

" I don't think it does," said Mrs. Jarley. 

"Ha, ha!" cried Mr. Slum, "you're giving 
way, you're coming down. Ask the perfumers, 
ask the blacking-makers, ask the hatters, ask the 
old lottery-office-keepers — ask any man among 
'em what my poetry has done for him, and mark 
my words, he blesses the name of Slum. If he's 
an honest man he raises his eyes to heaven, and 
blesses the name of Slum — mark that ! You 
are acquainted with Westminster Abbey, Mrs. 
Jarley?" i 

" Yes, surely." '- 

154 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

" Then upon my word and honour, ma'am, 
you'll find in a certain angle of that dreary pile, 
called Poets' Corner, a few smaller names than 
Slum," retorted that gentleman, tapping himself 
expressively on the forehead to imply that there 
was some slight quantity of brain behind it. " I' ve 
got a little trifle here now, "said Mr. Slum, taking 
off his hat which was full of scraps of paper, " a 
little trifle here, thrown off in the heat of the mo- 
ment, which I should say was exactly the thing 
you wanted to set this place on fire with. It's an 
acrostic — the name at this moment is Warren, but 
the idea's a convertible one, and a positive inspi- 
ration for Jarley. Have the acrostic." 

" I suppose it's very dear," said Mrs. Jarley. 

"Five shillings," returned Mr. Slum, using 
his pencil as a toothpick. "Cheaper than any 
prose." 

" I couldn't give more than three," said Mrs. 
Jarley. 

" Andsix,"retortedSlum. "Come. Three 

and six." 

Mrs. Jarley was not proof against the poet's 
insinuating manner, and Mr. Slum entered the 
order in a small note-book as a three-and-six- 
penny one. Mr. Slum then withdrew to alter the 
acrostic, after taking a most affectionate leave 
of his patroness, and promising to return, as 
soon as he possibly could, with a fair copy for the 
printer. 
155 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

It is unworthy of me, but somehow I have an 
uneasy feeling that Mr. Slum did not return as 
soon as he possibly could; and that when he did 
return it was with something utterly unsuitable. 
But before giving reasons for this lack of faith, a 
digression. 

Dickens, in his early childhood — as all the 
world knows, I suppose — worked in a blacking 
factory. The firm for which he worked was an 
enterprising firm. It is in connection with one of 
their advertising dodges, by the way, that one 
of the neatest puns in existence was once made. 
They employed men to chalk on the pavement 
these words : " Warren's blacking is the best." 
But the authorities forbade this; and so the work 
had to be done by stealth. One day a famous 
wit — I forget his name — was walking with a 
friend when he saw upon the flags the legend 
— left thus by one of the chalkers in the hurry 
of flight from the powers that were — "War- 
ren's B ." "The rest," said the wit, "is lack- 

:^^ *> 
mg. 

It was for this firm, then, that Dickens worked ; 
and attached to the staff were certain rhymsters. 
It was from one of these camp-followers that 
Dickens made his study of Mr. Slum. 

I can conceive that the tribe of Slum was un- 
savoury as any tribe of Bedouins. And yet, from 
the above-quoted passage, it would seem that, bar- 
ringan extra shade of dinginess and disreputable- 

156 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

ness and shamelessness, its manners and habits 
have changed but little in a hundred years. And 
I speak as one having authority. I have sat in the 
editorial chair. I have had to interview these gen- 
try daily. I know their ways. And I aver that they 
are Slum-like, some of them, to the core. They are 
Slum-like in their airy playfulness, in their poor 
pathetic pretence at having no definite business 
on hand as they drift into your office, in their 
gamesome approach to the point and purpose of 
their visit, and in the jauntiness of their aspect 
thinly veiling a haggard solicitude. Above all are 
they akin in their lofty indifference to the sordid 
details of barter, in their aptness at improving on 
a price offered, in their prompt acceptance of the 
agreed terms, their alacrity in clinching a bargain, 
and their dilatoriness in fulfilling their part of it, 
after you have fulfilled your part. Beyond this, 
there is about Mr. Slum the unmistakable taint 
of the greasy, frowsy Bohemian, all the civilised 
world over, which endures even unto this day ; 
and which testifies alike to the truth and the skill 
of Dickens' solitary presentment of this type. 
For, as a rule, he abstained from " shop " — even 
the big "shop" of literature. But . . . one wonders 
what he would have made of a novel in the vein 
oiPendenniSy a Pendennis pitched a little lower in 
the social scale, of course. 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Of his sufferings during those dark years of his 
boyhood in which he worked in the blacking fac- 
tory Dickens has written thus feelingly in David 
Copperjield : 

No words can express the secret agony of my ' 
soul as I sank into this companionship ; compared 
these everyday associates with those of my hap-fl 
pier childhood ; and felt my early hopes of grow- 
ing up to be a learned and distinguished man 
crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of 
the sense I had of being utterly without hope! 
now ; of the shame I felt in my position ; of the 
misery it was to my young heart to believe that^i 
day by day what I had learned and thought and | 
delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emula- 
tion up by, would pass away from me, little by 
little, never to be brought back any more, cannot 
be written. My whole nature was so penetrated 
with the grief and humiliation of such consider- 
ations that even now ... I often forget in my 
dreams that ... I am a man, and wander deso- 
lately back to that time of my life. . . . From 
Monday morning until Saturday night I had no 
advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no con- 
solation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, 
from anyone, that I can call to mind. ... I know 
that I lounged about the streets insufficiently 
and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that but for the 
mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any 
care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little 

158 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

vagabond. . . . That I suffered in secret, and 
that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but 
I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said 
already, utterly beyond my power to tell. No 
man's imagination can overstep the reality. But 
I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. . . . 
My rescue from this kind of existence I con- 
sidered quite hopeless and abandoned as such 
altogether ; though I am solemnly convinced 
that I never, for one hour, was reconciled to it, or 
was otherwise than miserably unhappy. 

At first, he writes in a letter to Forster refer- 
ring to the early days of his father's incarceration 
in the Marshalsea, " my mother and my brothers 
and sisters — excepting Fanny in the Royal Ac- 
ademy of Music — were still encamped, with a 
young servant-girl from Chatham Work-house, 
in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gow- 
er Street North." 

There were some feeble attempts to come to 
some arrangement with the creditors, which fail- 
ed. Then the establishment in Gower Street 
North was broken up, and the family, with the 
exception of Charles, went to live with John 
Dickens in the debtors' prison. Says Dickens : 

The key of the house was sent back to the land- 
lord, who was very glad to get it ; and I (small 
Cain that I was, except that I had never done 
harm to anyone) was handed over as a lodger to 
a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in 
159 



1 

DOkf 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Little College Street, Camden Town, who took 
children in to board. ... I felt keenly, how- 
ever, the being so cut off from my parents, my 
brothers, and sisters ; and, when my day's work 
was done, going home to such a miserable blank; 
and that^ I thought, might be corrected. One 
Saturday night I remonstrated with my father 
on this head, so pathetically and with so many 
tears, that his kind nature gave way. He began 
to think that it was not quite right, I do believe 
he had never thought so before, or thought about 
it. It was the first remonstrance I had ever made 
about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a little 
more than I intended. A back-attic was found ii 
for me at the house of an insolvent court-agent, 
who lived in Lant Street in the Borough. 

Says Forster : ■ 

What was to him (Charles) of course the great ' 
pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bring- 
ing him again, though after a fashion sorry en- 
ough, within the circle of home. From this time 
he used to breakfast "at home," in other words in 
the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates 
were open, and for the most part much earlier. 
They had no want of bodily comforts there. His 
father's income, still going on, was amply suffi- 
cient for that; and in every respect indeed but 
elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family 
lived more comfortably in prison than they had 
done for a long time out of it. They were waited 

1 60 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham 
Street, the orphan girl from the Chatham Work- 
house, from whose sharp little worldly and also 
kindly ways he took his first impression of the 
Marchioness in the Old Curiosity Shop. She too 
had a lodging in the neighbourhood that she 
might be early on the scene of her duties ; and 
when Charles met her, as he would do occasion- 
ally, in his lounging-place by London Bridge, he 
would occupy the time before the gates opened 
by telling her quite astonishing fictions about 
the wharves and the Tower. " But I hope I be- 
lieved them myself," he would say. Besides 
breakfast, he had supper also in the prison; and 
got to his lodging generally at nine o'clock. The 
gates closed always at ten. 

I must not omit (Forster goes on) what he told 

me of the landlord of this little lodging. He was 

a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was 

lame, and had a quiet old wife ; and he had a very 

innocent, grown-up son, who was lame too. They 

were all very kind to the boy. He (Charles) was 

taken with one of his old attacks of spasm one 

night, and the whole three of them were about 

I his bed until morning. They were all dead when 

: he told me this, but in another form they live still 

J very pleasantly as the Garland family in the Old 

■ Curiosity Shop. 

I So much and no more seems to be known of 
J the Garlands and the Marchioness; but I have 
t yielded to the temptation to include them in this 
I i6i L 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

chapter, and to dwell (I hope at not undue length)) 
upon the circumstances in which Dickens made' 
their acquaintance, because I feel that, alongside' 
the figure of the Poet Slum, they stand for a good 
deal. They stand for the indomitable spirit ofl 
Dickens which even in his boyhood lifted him 
above the hardships and the uglinesses of life 
and enabled him to mingle some laughter with 
his tears. . . . For I cannot believe that his delight f 
in these companions of that squalid time was 
wholly retrospective. ii 

In the same genre, but not nearly so closely re- 
lated to life as the real heroine of The Old Curi- 
osity Shop, is Little Dorrit. To believe in the 
humanity of the Marchioness is easy ; but to be- 
lieve in the humanity of Little Dorrit is to strain 
one's faith a little. Yet Little Dorrit had also — 
has still, we hope — a living prototype. 

Her name is Mrs. Mary Ann Cooper. She was 
the playmate and contemporary of Dickens, a re- 
cipient of some of his youthful confidences, and 
finally — her supreme achievement — the inspira- 
tion of his Child of the Marshalsea. She lives 
in the old-world village of Southgate, where, a 
year and a half ago, she was discovered by a 
journalist, and interviewed — to this effect : * 

I marvelled at the facility with which this old 
lady of ninety-eight set back the hands of time. 
A short pause, a slight lifting of the forefinger, a 

* Evening Times, November 26, 1910. 

162 



THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 

roll of the eyes, and a puckering of the brow were 
all the external evidences of how the retrospect 
was being prepared. Halfacentury was annihilat- 
ed in this flash to the days of Dickens. She lived 
again in the '30's and '40's, and was able to roll 
out the drama of the past with a command of lan- 
guage astonishing to one of a modern education. 

Her story of Dickens — Mr. Dickens, as she in- 
sists upon referring to the great novelist in com- 
pany — dealt with events andincidentsofahomely 
interest usually outside the scope of thebiograph- 
er. She took me backto the days of imprisonment 
for debt, and to scenes in the Marshalsea prison, 
in which Dickens' father was lodging at the time 
she became acquainted with the family. 

Mrs. Cooper's family were farmers at Sun- 
bury, but owing to the illness of her mother, 
much of her youth was spent under the care of 
a nurse at a farm in Somers Town. . . . 

It was here . . . that the friendship with 
Dickens was established, and here that she was 
given the sobriquet of "Little Dorrit" long be- 
fore the name was immortalised by the pen of 
her companion. As is shown in the writings of 
his biographers, Dickens had a fondness for 
nicknames, some of which were created without 
the slightest regard to relation or applicability. 
What provoked the application of "Little Dor- 
rit" to the then Mary Ann Mitton is a matter 
of mystery to the lady herself. . . . 

With what enthusiasm Mrs. Cooper told of the 
163 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

days when Dickens, who was four or five years her 
senior, used to visit her home at Sunbury for rest 
and recuperation ! After hard work in the gallery 
of the House of Commons or long hours of study 
in the chambers which he shared with young Mit- 
ton (Mary Ann Mitton's brother) he would rush 
off each Saturday for the Sunbury coach, and 
would spend a delightful week-end in ruraldom. 

It was at such times that he gave full play to 
the mischievous instincts of his boyhood. Bird- 
nesting, egg-stealing, rabbit-hunting, and bird- 
catching were mixed up with fishing, tramps 
over the fields, and story-telling round the fire- 
side. " Little Dorrit" was the co-partner in most 
of his antics and was always ready to join in any 
expedition of adventure. 

"Little Dorrit" tells how Dickens used to per- 
suade her to miss Sunday afternoon service at St. 
Pancras Church, in order to visit places of interest 
intheCity. He would always foreshadow some al- 
luring treat in the way of a visit to the Tower, fun 
with the beadles, or adventures in the parks. 

Then (says the journalist) my Victorian hos- 
tess took me to the days when fame and fortune 
entered into the life of her hero, and with a touch 
of insouciance, remarked that he began to move in 
circles far away beyond the ken of asimple country 
girl. Her own marriage was the beginning of the 
severance in the long association, although the 
intimate companionship between Dickens and 
her brother was maintained throughout his life. 



CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 
FAMILY PORTRAITS 



CHAPTER THE 

EIGHTH FAMILY PORTRAITS 

THE WORST THINGS THAT HAPPEN 
to us are sometimes the best for us. 

In the materialsenseitwasabadthingforDick- 
ens to have a M icawber for a father, a M rs. N ickle- 
by for a mother, and a pervasive atmosphere of 
shabby-genteel vagabondage in which to grow 
up. In the spiritual sense, however, it was a good 
thing; because such parents and such an envir- 
onment provided him with just the necessary in- 
centives to initiative and enterprise. A father of 
the Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel type 
might have made of Charles precisely what that 
gentleman of wealth and honour and a somewhat 
lamentable history made of his son Richard : a 
supercilious, cultured cad. He, like that unfortu- 
nate youth, would have been nourished on aphor- 
isms and moulded to a system which fitted him 
about as well as the original egg-shell fits the full- 
grown cockerel. Or, speaking more generally, he 
might have come into a world newly cushioned 
and upholstered and padded for his reception, in 
which to tumble about at his pleasure ; and, never 
having hurt himself in his tumbles, to lose alto- 
gether at last the knack of maintaining his equili- 
brium. 

Almost any kind of father would have been 
a better kind of father than John Dickens was: 
that is to say, a better kind of father for an aver- 
167 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

age child. But for the child who is not average, 
for the child who is destined to be a genius, the 
less parental control and guidance the better. I 
think it is Mr. Zangwill who says, though I may- 
be misquoting his exact words, that it takes a 
man of a certain talent to sire a genius. If Mr. 
Zangwill had said that it takes a man of an un- 
certain talent — the sort of man who buries his 
talent in a napkin, thus hiding it from the world, 
and maybe from himself; and who, as a result 
goes about the world fluking things instead of 
doing them — if Mr. Zangwill had said that it 
takes this kind of man to sire a genius I would be 
the more inclined to agree with him. 

A genius is the only free man. All other men 
— one hates to have to use this kind oi cliche, but 
in the present instance there seems to be no help 
for it — all other men, then, are the slaves of their 
heredity and environment, instead of being the' 
masters thereof. And not a thousand Max Nor- 
daus, nor a million of his disciples, shall convince 
me that genius is ever decadent. On the con- 
trary, genius is always the supreme expression of 
some one or other among the highest aspirations 
of which mankind is capable. And I am not now- 
narrowing genius down to the genius of art or 
literature or music, or even religion. There is a 
genius of devotion, of self-sacrifice, of martyr- 
dom. There is perhaps even that genius which 
Carlyle comically defines as an infinite capacity 

i68 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

for taking pains : that kind of genius which de- 
votes a Hfetime to the study of (say) toxic alka- 
loids, and thus adds one more good grain of mor- 
tar to the Temple of Science. There are as many 
kinds of genius as there are fields of activity still 
left open for mankind to explore. 

And there, it may be, you have the secret of 
genius: the genius is an explorer, a pioneer. He 
follows his bent to its logical conclusion, often- 
times not knowing whither it will lead him, 
but following it resolutely, unfalteringly, until it 
brings him up against the mysterious Something 
he has been searchinsf for. You know how the 
natural, simple, straightforward, innocent child 
will wander out into a wide field on tottering feet 
in quest of it knows not what, and moon along 
and re-discover all sorts of old things and exult 
in them as new miracles. To such a child the 
perpetual parental injunction: "Come back!" 
" Don't go there ! " " You must not do that, say 
that, touch that ! " is usually fatal. At first the 
child rebels, pursues his course, and then . . . 
is caught up and dragged away and perhaps 
knocked about ... for its ultimate good, of 
course. The child thereupon begins to realise 
with a sort of weary bitter heart-sickness that 
this is a world of forbidden things, a world of 
prohibitions and denials. It is very annoying, 
very stultifying, very unsatisfactory. But being 
only a child he gives in at last to superior force 
169 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

or for the sake of the loaves and fishes, acquiesces 
languidly in an accepted order of things, and 
gradually schools himself little by little to follow 
the line of least resistance. He is less fortunate 
than the child of the untutored savage who, being 
flung headlong into a deep pool, must needs swim 
by instinct for dear life. 

Little Charles D ickens, cursed and blessed with 
parents who had no guiding principles at all, who 
drifted before the winds of circumstance like balls 
of thistledown in a gale, was spared the iron hand || 
of discipline, thwarting and crippling him. Some 
rudimentary morality, of course ; some glimmer- 
ings of a Most High; some conception of a co- 
ordinated scheme of things in which each human 
atom was cast to play its appointed part; some dim 
perception of a vast abstraction, vaguely and var- 
iously referred to as Civilisation, Decency, Re- ■ 
spectability, Public Opinion, Right and Wrong, 
and so on : some sense of all these queer social 
anomalies was inevitably grafted upon his green 
bourgeoning mind,andduly fulfilled their function 
in colouring its tone and coarsening its texture. 
But apart from these limitations of his natural 
proclivities, he was mercifully exempt from those 
deadly restraining influences under which chil- 
dren more amenable to authority wilt into youth 
and fade into manhood or womanhood. 

Imagine Dickens as the only son of a Noncon- 
formist parson, with a Quakeress for a mother. 

170 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

Even then he would, no doubt, being a genius, 
have achieved some measure of emancipation. 
He would have moved more freely than his fel- 
lows, but only within or only a little beyond their 
limits. As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined ; 
but the tree that stands alone stretches straight 
up toward the sky. 

" Pray, Mr. Dickens,"someone asked of Char- 
les' father, " where was your son educated ? " 

** Why, indeed, sir — ha, ha ! — he may be said 
to have educated himself," was the reply. 

An apt rejoinder enough, in a way; but itwould 
have been truer to say that " Life in her creak- 
ing shoes," with her cruel birch, had been his real 
schoolmistress. 

John Dickens was one of those men who are 
loved not for themselves, but for what they might 
have been if they were other than they are. This 
is not too clear, perhaps ; but I think it expresses 
the cloudy fact, which is, that there are certain of 
our fellow-creatures who seem to exhale a sort 
of aura of goodwill and good-humour through 
which it is well-nigh impossible to pierce to the 
sorry reality of flesh and blood, heart and mind. 
They not only deceive themselves, but in some 
indefinable way succeed in deceiving others also. 
They believe that they are wise ; and, though 
they are foolish, the world shares their belief. 
They believe that they are uniformlyunfortunate 
171 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS - 

in all that they undertake ; and, although their il 
repeated failures are obviously due to their own 
ineptitude the world sympathises with them, and 
agrees with them, " They mean well," it is said; 
and their good intentions count for more than 
other men's good deeds. I think that John Dick- 
ens was that kind of man. 

At the time of Charles' birth he was a clerk, 
under Government, in the navy-pay office sta- 
tioned at Portsmouth. 

When Charles was two years old the family re- 
moved to Chatham. There they stayed for eight 
years, and then, in 1822, John Dickens was re- 
called to Somerset House. In the winter of that 
year he departed by coach for London, accom- 
panied by his wife and children, with the excep- 
tion of Charles, who was left behind for a few 
weeks longer in the care of a schoolmaster, Wil- 
liam Giles. 

It was during these few weeks of separation 
from his parents and brothers and sisters that the 
lonely little boy, probably in search of relief from 
his loneliness, made his first intimate acquain- 
tance with books. Says he : 

My father had left a small collection of books in 
a little room upstairs to which I had access (for it 
adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our 
house ever troubled. From that blessed little 
room, Roderick Random^ Peregrine Pickle^ Hum- 

172 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

phry Clinker, Tom J ones, The Vicar of Wakejieldy 
Don Quixote, Gil Bias, diVid. Robinson Crusoe c^mQ 
out, a glorious host, to keep me company. 

But very soon — all too soon, perhaps, seeing 
what new friends Charles had lately made — the 
day arrived for him to follow the rest of the Dick- 
ens family to London. It was in the early spring 
of 1823 that Charles Dickens entered London 
for the first time. His first impressions, how- 
ever, were not of the brightest, he having (as he 
afterwards observed) "exchanged everything 
that had given his ailing little life its picturesque- 
ness or sunshine " for the comparatively sordid 
environment of a London suburb, and suffered 
the deprivation of the companionship of his play- 
fellows at Chatham to become a solitary lad under 
circumstances that could not fail (says Mr. Kit- 
ton) to make sorrowful the stoutest heart, not the 
least depressing being his father's money involve- 
ment with consequent poverty at home. John 
Dickens, whose financial affairs demanded re- 
trenchment, had rented "a mean small tenement" 
in Bayham Street, Camden Town. 

The misery and depression of spirits from 
which Charles suffered whilst living here must 
be attributed (Mr. Kitton goes on to say) to 
family adversity and his own isolated condition 
rather than to the character of his environment. 
At this time his father's pecuniary resources 
173 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

became so circumscribed as to compel the obser- 
vance of the strictest domestic economy, and pre- 
vented him from continuing his son's education. 
" As I thought," said Dickens on one occasion 
very bitterly, " in the little back-garret in Bay- 
ham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, 
what would I have given — if I had had anything 
to give — to have been sent back to any other 
school, to have been taught something any- 
where ! " 

Instead of improvingthe elder Dickens' affairs 
went from bad to worse, and all ordinary efforts 
to propitiate his creditors having been exhausted, 
Mrs. Dickens laudably resolved to attempt a so- 
lution of the difficulty by means of a school for 
young ladies. 

Says Forster, of this desperate epoch : 

The time was now come for her to exert herself, 
she said; and she "must do something." The 
godfather down at Limehouse was reported to 
have an Indian connection. People in the East 
Indies always sent their children home to be I 
educated. She would set up a school. They ■ 
would all grow rich by it. And then, thought the 
sick boy, "perhaps even I might go to school my- 
self." 

A house wassoon foundat number four,Gower , 
StreetNorth;abrass plate on the door announced f 

174 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

Mrs. Dickens' Establishment; and the result 
may be given in the exact words of the then small 
actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised 
so high. ** I left, at a great many doors, a great 
many circulars calling attention to the merits of 
the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to 
school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever pro- 
posed to come, or that the least preparation was 
ever made to receive anybody. But I know that 
we got on very badly with the butcher and the 
baker ; that very often we had not too much for 
dinner ; and that at last my father was arrested." 
The interval between the sponging-house and 
the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in 
running errands and carrying messages for the 
prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and through 
shining tears ; and the last words said to him by 
his father before he was finally carried to the 
Marshalsea were to the effect that the sun had set 
upon him for ever. " I really believed at the 
time," said Dickens, "that they had broken my 
heart." 

Of Dickens' first visit to the Marshalsea he has 
written thus in a letter that was afterwards turn- 
ed to account in David Copperfield : 

My father was waiting for me in the lodge, 
and we went up to his room (on the top storey 
but one) and cried very much. And he told me, 
I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, 
175 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a 
year, and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shill- 
ings, and sixpence, he would be happy ; but that 
a shilling spent the other way would make him 
wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now; with 
two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each 
side, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some 
other debtor shared the room with him, who came 
in by-and-by ; and as the dinner was a joint stock 
repast, I was sent up to " Captain Porter " in the 
room overhead, with Mr. Dickens' compliments, 
and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend 
me a knife and fork ? 

Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his 
compliments in return. There was a very dirty 
lady in his little room ; and two wan girls, his 
daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I 
should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's 
comb. The Captain himself was in the last extre- 
mity of shabbiness ; and if I could draw at all, I 
would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old, 
brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat be- 
low it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed 
rolled up in a corner ; and I knew (God knows 
how) that the two girls with the shock heads 
were Captain Porter's natural children, and that 
the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. 

This Captain Porter was, obviously, the origi- 
nal of Captain Hopkins in David Copperfield. 

And then the luck turned, as luck always does 

176 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

turn for men of the John Dickens type, though bet- 
ter men starve. 

A rather considerable legacy from a relative 
accrued to John Dickens. This, in addition to the 
official pension due for long service at Somerset 
House, enabled him to meet his financial respon- 
sibilities, with the result that the Marshalsea 
knew him no more. 

Charles, however, still remained in the black- 
ing business, until, as the result of a quarrel be- 
tween John Dickens and James Lamert, who had 
obtained the post for the boy, the father declared 
that his son should leave and go to school instead. 

He went to school, at Wellington House Aca- 
demy, in Granby Street, Hampstead Road. Wel- 
lington House Academy, and its proprietor, Mr. 
William Jones, are satirised as Salem House and 
lAv.Qr&dtkX&mDavidCoppef'jfield. There Charles 
remained for two years, "without achieving any 
particular distinction as a pupil," which, in the 
circumstances, was not remarkable. And that 
was all the scholastic education Dickens ever re- 
ceived. 

On leaving school Charles was immediately 
sent to work. He went as office-boy to a Mr. Mol- 
loy, a solicitor. His father, however, presently 
transferred him to another firm, with whom he 
stayed for three or four years. 

Meanwhile John Dickenshad learnt shorthand 
and obtained an appointment as reporter on the 
177 M 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Morning Herald. In the profession of journal- 
ism Charles followed him in 1828, and six years] 
afterward achieved fame with Pickwick. 

Two years later we find him journeying to 
Exeter to make a new home for his prodigal 
parents in that locality, and there they settled. 
That he had done more than his duty by them is 
apparent from one of his letters in which he de- 
scribes the cottage he rented for them, and its 
surroundings. "I do assure you," he says, writing] 
to his friend, Mr. Thomas Mitton, "that I ami 
charmed with the place and the beauty of the ' 
country round about, though I have not seen it 
under very favourable circumstances. ... It is j 
really delightful, and when the house is to rights 
and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to! 
leave it. . . . The situation is charming; meadows 
in front; an orchard running parallel to the garden 
hedge, richly wooded hills closing in the prospect 
behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid 
view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the 
cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most: 
picturesque manner possible. I don't think I ever 
saw so cheerful and pleasant a spot." 

Thus Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens rode safely 
into harbour, and so remained at anchorage at 
last — until 1851, when the father died. He was 
buried in Highgate cemetery, and the tombstone 
placed over him by his illustrious son offers tribute 

178 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

to his " zealous, useful, cheerful spirit." His wife 
survived him twelve years. 

Such is the record of John Dickens, a typical 
Englishman, with the typical English habit of 
muddling along, of muddling through, somehow, 
anyhow. He was, essentially, you know, rather a 
rascal ; but a genial rascal, a rascal with a flourish 
and an air. He swindled poor tradesmen out of 
their store ; but he had a saving grace, which is 
lacking from some others of his kidney, in that he 
swindled them without at the same time patron- 
ising and scorning them. I am pretty sure that he 
addressed his infuriated bootmaker or tailor as 
" My dear Mr. Snob ... or Snip," as the case 
might be. I am pretty sure that when he called 
to give a fresh order for wine he was careful to 
be polite to the vintner's wife, paying her courtly 
compliments, and to take kindly notice of the vint- 
ner's children, patting them on the head, pinch- 
ing their cheeks, and even scattering largess of 
pennies among them. He was hail-fellow-well- 
met with all classes alike. He would be that kind 
of man. And there are many of his kind to be met 
with, nowadays as thenadays, at the clubs and 
elsewhere. But . . . the ugly doubt obtrudes : 
Was there not something rather mean and shabby 
and furtive beneath all this magnificence and 
magniloquence .'* 

It is to be borne in mind that he started life as 
179 



1 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

a clerk under Government : as one of that species 
of superior being blessed above all that toil and 
spin : a Civil Servant — and trebly blessed in those 
days, when an influential friend and not a vulgar 
competitive examination was the only Open Ses- 
ame to a fine fat sinecure. If he had been some 
poor devil of an artist or author, chopping his 
brains into faggots to keep the domestic pot a- 
boiling, there would have been some excuse for 
his thriftlessness. But he married on an assured 
income. He knew just exactly what his prospects | 
were. He had a pension to look forward to. 
Moreover he had given hostages to Fortune, 
and it was his plain bounden duty to redeem his 
pledge by so ordering his life as to balance equit- 
ably his liabilities with his assets. Indeed he 
seems to have been wantonly and even wickedly 
reckless and improvident ; one suspects some 
gross and callous self-indulgence somewhere. 
He was " thoughtless," as we say, which, being 
interpreted, means " heartless," more often than 
not. He was one of those who can smile and 
smile and be a villain with impunity, with credit 
even. The base sordid fact of his being cravenly 
incapable of facing the world and holding him- 
self erect under the burden of his obligations he 
cloaked within a rare embroidery of fine words 
and swept aside with spacious gestures. His 
little boy he cast with one of those gestures to 
the winds of chance. And even when his fortunes 

i8o 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

were retrieved, by no merit of his, he let his little 
boy drudge on in menial servitude, uncared for 
and alone, only withdrawing him from that de- 
grading employment, in order to vindicate his 
own flatulent dignity, after having had a tiff with 
the brother-in-law who had befriended him in his 
hour of need. For two years his sense of outraged 
dignity sustained him in the performance of his 
fatherly duty ; and then his child is once more 
pitched neck and crop into the world, to work 
again at the first sorry trade that offers : at any 
trade, it matters not what, so long as it brings in 
a few shillings a week, though by this time John 
Dickens was drawing his pension and earning 
other money besides by his reporting. Truly there 
is a touch of colossal selfishness, almost criminal, 
in this attitude of the improvident, indifferent fa- 
ther towardthe eager, willing, loving childof light 
whom he has begotten. 

So, he runs — or rather saunters easily along — 
his flower-strewn course ; accepts the blessings 
that Fate in the person of his wonder-child drops 
into his lap ; accepts them as the tardy reward of 
hisvirtue,thecompensationfor his long-suffering; 
and so dies at last in the patriarchal style, in an 
odour of sanctity, and is buried under a tribute of 
blind love and misguided devotion. 

Some of the great Micawber's more eccentric 
foibles were borrowed from the personality of a 
queerliterarygent., named Thomas Powell, whom 
i8i 



li 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Dickens met in America, and many of whose 
strange idiosyncrasies were described at some 
length in the Boston hidex some years ago. He 
also was a man with a large family. He also could 
be embarrassingly confidential on the smallest 
possible provocation. He also had a mania for 
writing letters in the flamboyant style; it is said 
that he would write them to people who were 
staying in the same hotel, the same house, and 
even in the same room with him. But Mr. Powell 
does not matter much, I think. The fact stands 
that essentially Micawber was deliberately and 
consciously founded on John Dickens by the one 
man who knew him best and least, his son. 

"The longer I live the better man I think 
him," said Dickens toward the end of his career, 
speaking of his father ; and at scattered intervals 
throughout his life he bore testimony to the affec- 
tionate esteem in which he held his father's mem- 
ory, thus : 

' I know my father to be as kind-hearted and gener- 
ous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything 
that I can remember of his conduct to his wife 
or children or friends, in sickness or affliction, is 
beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he 
has watched night and day,unweariedlyand pati- 
ently, many nights and days. He never under- 
took any business, charge, or trust, that he did 
notzealously,conscientiously,punctually,honour- 

182 






THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

ably discharge. His industry has always been un- 
tiring. He was proud of me in his way, and had 
a great admiration of my comic singing. But, in 
the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his 
means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this 
time the idea of educating me at all, and to have 
utterly put from him the notion that I had any 
claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I 
degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morn- 
ing, and my own ; and making myself useful in 
the work of the little house ; and looking after my 
younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in 
all) and going on such poor errands as arose out 
of our poor way of living./ 

That is in serious, these in lighter, vein : 

If you should have an opportunity, pendente lite, 
as my father would observe — indeed did on some 
memorable ancient occasions when he informed 
me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at 
bay. . . . 

There has arrived a characteristic letter for Kate 
from my father. He dates it Manchester, and says 
he has reason to believe that he will be in town 
with the pheasants, on or about the first of Oc- 
tober. He has been with Fanny in the Isle of 
Man for nearly two months ; finding there, as he 
goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every 
description of Continental luxury at a cheap 
rate. . . . 
183 



m 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

I have a letter from my father lamenting the fine 
weather, invoking congenial tempests, and in- 
forming me that it will not be possible for him to 
stay more than another year in Devonshire, as 
he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate 
Augustus's French. ... 

Describing the departure from Genoa of an 
English physician and acquaintance, he says : 

We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice , 
— or, as my father would say, to be deprived, to '| 
£1 certain extent, of the concomitant advantages, 
whatever they may be, resultingfromhis medical 
skill, such as it is,and his professional attendance, 
in so far as it may be so considered. 

In the same way also it delighted Dickens to 
recall that it was of one of his connections that 
his father wrote this truly wonderful sentence : 

And I must express my tendency to believe that 
his longevity is. (to say the least of it) extremely 
problematical. 

It was to another connection, who had been in- 
sisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and 
nonconformist superiorities, that he addressed 
the following : 11 

The Supreme Being must be an entirely different 

184 




MRS JOHN DICKENS 
"Mrs Nickleby" 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

individual from what I have every reason to be- 
lieve him to be, if he would care in the least for 
the society of your relations. 

Comic, indeed ! Quite in the style, apart from 
its flashes of humour, of the most banal pomposi- 
ties of " that pot of flat porter," Doctor Johnson! 
But did not Dickens graft similar whimsicalities 
on to some of his most abandoned scoundrels ? 

And the wife of this unconscious humorist, 
whose oddities made you laugh until the tears 
came, distorting your vision, irradiating his out- 
lines until they became a mere blur of brightness: 
what of Mrs. Dickens, Charles Dickens' mother, 
upon whom it is said that Mrs. Nickleby, the fool- 
ish, vain, and flighty, frivolous and garrulous 
and more than slightly selfish Mrs. Nickleby is 
founded ? Dickens' only direct reference to his 
mother is in relation to his emancipation from the 
slavery of the blacking-factory. 

My father said I should go back no more, and 
should go to school. I do not write resentfully 
or angrily, for I know how all these things have 
worked together to make me what I am ; but I ne- 
ver afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never 
can forget, that my mother was warm for my be- 
ing sent back. 
185 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

In this brief allusion is matter forconsideration, 
indeed ! First in Dickens' own frank acknow- 
ledgment of the debt that his successful career 
owed to his early experiences of hardship and 
poverty and suffering ; and again in the revelation 
it affords of the sort of woman his mother was. 

Now there is extraordinarily little known of 
the elder Mrs. Dickens. The many books written 
around her son contain only the most cursory 
mention of her name. But this fierce, bitter re- 
ference to her (for Dickens' natural protest of 
fealty may be ignored : he doth protest too much) 
throws a vivid sidelight on her character. It ex- 
plains a strange deficiency in all Dickens' books : 
a deficiency in the sense that whereas most men 
recall throughout their lives a feeling of intense 
love and duty and gratitude toward their mothers* 
memory, Dickens' work is strikingly free from 
any expression, definite or implied, of this feel- 
ing. There is not a real mother in all his crowded 
gallery of immortal figures; David Copperfield's 
mother is just an inane, pretty-pretty abstraction, U 
and that is all. With two exceptions, in Nicholas ' 
Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge, his heroes have i 
all been bereft of their mothers in their infancy, j 
The mother of Barnaby Rudge is a mere melo- j 
dramatic figure. Remains, then, Mrs. Nickleby, } 
who — we have the author's own word for it — | 
was his own mother in disguise : an empty- 
headed, foolish, vain gossip whom her children 

i86 

i 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

have to humour and coax at every turn with the 
patient, long-suffering kindness that one shows 
toward a naughty, intractable child. But we 
have seen the kind of father Dickens had : a 
very poor kind ; yet Dickens loved him dearly, 
proving that he did not want in filial affection. 
May it not be, then, since he was habitually so 
reticent about his mother, and betrays in his 
writings so poor a sense of the inestimable bless- 
ing of a good mother, that he was unfortunate in 
this parent ; and that to the lack of a wise and 
worthy mother's influence is due one of the most 
serious defects in his mental equipment : a de- 
fect that manifests itself in his alternately maud- 
lin or cheapening or flippant treatment of the 
whole sex ? 

The mother of a great man is always import- 
ant. Her character cannot fail to have a vital 
effect on the character of her son. One might 
suggest, then, perhaps, that Dickens' always 
slightly contemptuous attitude toward the things 
he had not taken the trouble to understand was 
in fact an hereditary trait directly derived from 
his mother. The idea is put forward diffidently, 
but in all seriousness, as a possible explanation 
of Dickens' more obvious inconsistencies and 
limitations. 

" I know how all these things have worked to- 
gether to make me what I am," says Dickens. 
187 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

And there is a certain note of poignancy in 
that utterance, a certain abrupt trenchancy and 
depth of feeling, a warrant of acute perception, 
an evidence of profound philosophy, which Dick- 1 
ens is generally artist enough to keep out of his ■ 
published work. You might read Dickens from 
end to end, as one reads idle tales, and never 
discover that he was a philosopher at all. Many 
have. Many do. There are some who deny him 
the possession of any cohesive philosophy ; be- 
cause, forsooth, he is not as one of those inferior 
flashy tradesmen who put all their wares in the 
window and keep nothing in the shop. 

But . . . there can be no philosophy without 
suffering ; and equally is it true that no one who 
has suffered and lived and come through can be 
other than a philosopher. To suggest, as some 
do, that Dickens, from first to last, maintained (as 
he did) his divinely sane standpoint toward all 
things of life and death and the Great Beyond by 
a series of gorgeous flukes : this is merely to foam 
at the mouth. 

Thomas Carlyle could foam a little, at times; 
but he was, after all, a keen judge of men, and af- 
ter Dickens' death he wrote, in a letter of condol- 
ence to his nearest and dearest : 

" It is almost thirty years since my acquaint- 
ance with him began ; and on my side, I may say, 
every new meeting ripened it into more and more 

i88 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

clear discernment of his rare and great worth as 
a brother man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sight- 
ed, quietly decisive, just, and loving man: till at 
length he had grown to such a recognition with 
me as I have rarely had for any man of my time. 
This I can tell you three, for it is true and will be 
welcome to you: to others less concerned I had 
as soon not speak on such a subject." To one other 
less concerned he wrote : " I am profoundly sorry 
foryozt, and indeed for myself, and for us all. It is 
an event world-wide; a uniqtie of talents sudden- 
ly extinct ; and has eclipsed, we two may say, ' the 
harmless gaiety of nations.' No death since 1 866 
has fallen on me with such a stroke. No literary 
man's hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, 
high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens — every 
inch of him an honest man." 

I am a little impatient of thatlastflourish. "An 
Honest Man " savours somewhat of condescen- 
sion. It is beside the mark, too, as it affects the pub- 
lic side of Dickens. Dickens was honest, of course. 
But he was not blatantly, indecently honest: nor 
did he flaunt his honesty in the face of his reader, 
as I think Thackeray, for instance, did sometimes. 
Dickens was not given to any overt form of self- 
revelation. Indeed there was never an author of 
his calibre whoso persistently andconsistentlyhid 
himself behind his characters as Dickens did. 
With the result that there are already almost as 
189 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

many versions of the man Dickens as there are 
people who remember him in the flesh. I have | 
talked with some of his contemporaries and have 
been amazed at the diversity of their varying im- 
pressions of his personality. In a few more de- 
cades I predict that he will be as much a mystery 
as Edgar Allan Poe. In a century or so he will 
have grown into the proportions of a myth. In 
two or three hundred years it may be abundantly 
proved that not only he, but George Eliot and 
Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte also, were Geo- 
rge Henry Lewes. 

But, seriously speaking, all this points, I think, 
to the truth that Dickens was essentially a self- 
contained and self-sufficient man. Underneath 
all that bubbling effervescence of his perennial 
youth, his high spirits and his gay insouciance, 
there was all the time the grave, sad, moody man 
who peers forth at us from those later portraits of 
him that photography has made the most familiar 
to us. And these innate powers of stern reserve 
and self-restraint which were never broken down j 
in his moments of freest expansion, were fostered 
in him in his childhood: in that wonderful child- 
hood which he never quite outgrew: that child- 
hood of precocious knowledge and wise inno- 
cence, of incongruous kinship with the poor in- 
articulate victims of social injustice, of whom 
he too was one, in the dark days of his servi- 
tude. 

190 



i 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

**I know how all these things have worked to- 
gether to make me what I am." 

Father, mother, the blacking-factory, the drud- 
gery, the Marshalsea, the squalid lodgings and 
mean makeshifts, the uncouth companions and 
grotesque associates of his tender infancy : Mrs. 
Pipchin, who was really Mrs. Roylance, the lady 
of Little College Street who took children in to 
board, Charles among them ; Captain Porter, 
whom we have already glimpsed; and Mealy Po- 
tatoes, Bob Fagin in the flesh, his chum and cham- 
pion at Warren's, of whom he writes in David 
Copperjield : 

Mick Waller . . . informed me that our princi- 
pal associate would be another boy whom he in- 
troduced by the — to me — extraordinary name of 
Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this 
youth had not been christened by that name, but 
that it had been bestowed upon him in the ware- 
house, on account of his complexion, which was 
pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, 
who had the additional distinction of being a fire- 
man, and was engaged as such at one of the large 
theatres ; where some young relation of Mealy's 
— I think his little sister — did Imps in the Panto- 
mimes. 

Of all that queer group there is only one who 
seems to have been in any sense a congenial com- 
191 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

panion for little Charles. That one notable excep- 
tion was his sister Fanny. Of his other brothers 
and sisters we know curiously little; but some 
shadowylikenessof Fanny Dickens has been pre- 
served, it is said, in the figure of Fanny Dorrit, 
a vain, pretty, wilful, spoilt darling — first of mis- 
fortune, and then of fortune. Fanny Dickens 
seems to have been in some sort a fellow-spirit. 
In Dickens' later youth she seems to have been 
keenly interested in his theatrical ambitions, andli 
to have aided and abetted his attempts to go 
upon the stage as an actor. Charles had written 
to Barclay, who was stage manager at Covent 
Garden, telling him with the exquisite effrontery 
of youth how old he was, and exactly what he 
thought he could do : how that he believed he had 
a strong perception of character and oddity, and 
a natural power of reproducing in his own person 
what he observed in others. There must have 
been something in his letter that impressed the 
authorities, for they wrote to him with an ap- 
pointment, suggesting that he should do some- 
thing of Mathews'. " My sister Fanny was in . 
the secret (he writes) and was to go with me to 
play the songs." But when the day of trial camehe , 
was laid up with a terrible bad cold and inflamma- 
tion of the face ; and so somehow that particular 
ambition subsided. 

But the incident is significant as suggesting 
that Fanny Dickens had some glimmerings of 

192 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

what I must call, for lack of a better phrase, the 
artistic temperament. 

Whilst he was still engaged at his drudgery 
at the blacking-factory, she had been elected as 
a pupil of the Royal Academy of Music ; and 
he has told what a stab to his heart it was, think- 
ing of his own disregarded condition, to see her 
go away to begin her education, amid the tearful 
good wishes of everybody in the house. 

A year or two later she won one of the prizes 
offered to the Academy pupils. Charles, still at 
his drudgery, went to see her receive the prize, 
and writes thus of his emotions at witnessing this 
event : "I could not bear to think of myself — be- 
yond the reach of all such honourable emulation 
and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt 
as if my heart were rent. I prayed, when I went 
to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humilia- 
tion and neglect in which I was. I never had 
suffered so much before. There was no envy in 
this." 

'* There was little need that he should say so," 
is Forster's comment. " Extreme enjoyment in 
witnessing the exercise of her talents, the utmost 
pride in every success obtained by them, he mani- 
fested always to a degree otherwise quiteunusual 
with him." 

Soon afterward she married that Mr. Henry 
Burnett whom Dickenssostrangelyidealised; and 
with her marriage her serious career as an artist 
193 N 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

may be said to have come to an end. Ultimately 
her health began to break down, and an inevit- 
abletragedy was foreshadowed. "There seems to 
be no doubt whatever thatFanny is inaconsump- 
tion," wrote Dickens in 1846. She had broken 
down in an attempt to sing at a party in Man- 
chester; and subsequent examination by a doctor 
revealed the sad cause. In 1848 she died ; and her 
death opened the floodgates of reminiscence in 
her bereaved brother's heart. 

He recalled fondly how he and she had been 
used to wander at night, as children, in a grim old 
churchyard near their house, looking up at the 
stars, and talking in awed whispers about them. 
Something of the fancies that their childish ima- 
gination wove about the splendours of that glit- 
tering host, under cover of the stillness and the 
dark, Dickens afterward embodied in his "Child's 
Dream of a Star." 

This chapter may appropriately conclude, I 
think, with a morsel of the dainty fabric of that tale, 
since it seems to me that therein is expressed, more 
frankly than anywhere else in Dickens' work, 
something of the wistfulness and vain longing 
that transformed the barren wilderness in which 
he lived as a child into a fairy playground. 



There was once a child, and he strolled about 
a good deal, and thought of a number of things. 

194 



THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 

He had a sister, who was a child too, and his con- 
stant companion. These two used to wonder all 
day long. They wondered at the beauty of the 
flowers; they wondered at the height and blue- 
ness of the sky ; they wondered at the depth of 
the bright water ; they wondered at the good- 
ness and the power of God who made the lovely 
world. 

They used to say to one another, sometimes, 
Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, 
would the flowers, and the water, and the sky be 
sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children 
of the flowers, and the little playful streams that 
gambol down the hillsides are the children of the 
water ; and the smallest bright specks playing at 
hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be 
the children of the stars ; and they would all be 
grieved to see their playmates, the children of 
men, no more. 

There was one clear shining star that used to 
come out in the sky beforethe rest, near the church 
spire, above the graves. It was larger and more 
beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and 
every night they watched for it, standing hand in 
hand at a window. Whoever saw it first cried out, 
" I see the star ! " And often they cried out both 
together, knowing so well when it would rise, and 
where. So they grew to be such friends with it, 
that, before lying down in their beds, they always 
looked out once again, to bid it good-night ; and 
195 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS f 

when they were turning round to sleep they used ^ 
to say, " God bless the star ! " 



The sister of the story went to live in that star 
whilst she was yet a child. The sister of flesh and 
blood lived in it all her life, I think. 



CHAPTER THE NINTH 
ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 



I 






CHAPTER NINE 

OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

MR. GILBERT CHESTERTON, WHO IS 
sometimes more dazzling than illuminative, says 
of the least known of Dickens' books: "It is called 
A Child's History of England, but the child is 
the writer and not the reader." Here, it seems 
to me, Mr. Chesterton speaks truth ; but it is not 
the truth about Charles Dickens : it is the truth 
about Gilbert Chesterton. Only once did Dick- 
ens consciously and deliberately adopt the atti- 
tude of the average adult toward children, and 
that was when he wrote the Child's History. At 
all other times he is the immortal child whose 
genius makes children of all of us altogether. At 
all other times he is the inspired boy telling fairy 
tales to the grown-ups. His Child's History was 
in some sort a fairy tale also ; but with this differ- 
ence that it is not inspired. It was indeed a labour 
of love, and the labour is very apparent ; in all 
Dickens' other works — and they are every one 
of them labours of love — it is the love and not 
the labour that vivifies them. But Mr. Chester- 
ton, being himself a child, refuses to be taken in 
by grandfather's top-hat, frock-coat, and specta- 
cles, even when worn by a grand father. H e knows 
the trick of that himself. He has often practised 
it himself, with huge success. He is in the posi- 
tion of a conjuror watching the sleight of hand of 
199 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

another conjuror. " You can't deceive me, Mr. 
Dickens," he says, not realising that it is always 
unnecessary to deceive those who are only too 
eager to deceive themselves. 

In A Child's History of England Dickens for 
a time puts aside the child and definitely assumes 
the man. That this is so Mr. Chesterton, having 
made his point, admits when he says : 

A collection of the works of Dickens would be 
incomplete in an essential as well as a literal 
sense without his Child's History of England. It 
may not be important as a contribution to his- 
tory, but it is important as a contribution to bio- 
graphy ; as a contribution to the character and 
the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man 
of his time. That he had made no personal his- 
torical researches, that he had no special histori- 
cal learning, that he had not had, in truth, even 
anything that could be called a good education, 
all this accentuates not the merit but at least the 
importance of the book. For here we may read 
in plain popular language, written by a man 
whose genius for popular exposition has never 
been surpassed among men, a brief account of 
the origin and meaning of England as it seemed 
to the average Englishman of that age. 

But the average Englishman of any age is ne- 
ver a child. 

200 



\ 




THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES DICKENS 
WITH "GRIP" THE RAVEN 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

Writing of another of Dickens' adventures in 
history, Mr. Chesterton is, however, irrefutably 
right when he says : 

He wrote a book about two cities, one of which 
he understood ; the other he did not understand. 
And his description of the city he did not know is 
almost better than his description of the city he 
did know. This is the entrance of the unques- 
tionable thing about Dickens: the thing called 
genius ; the thing which everyone has to talk ab- 
out directly and distinctly because no one knows 
what it is. . . . His actual ignorance of France 
went with amazing intuitive perception of the 
truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly 
the plain mark of the man of genius ; that he can 
understand what he does not understand. 

Dickenswas inspired to the studyof the French 
Revolution and to the writingr of a romance about 
it by the example and influence of Carlyle. . . . 
Carlyle had read a great deal about the French 
Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all, ex- 
cept Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected 
his ideas by the careful collation of documents 
and the verification of references. Dickens was 
a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in 
the streets, and those always the same streets ; as 
I have said, he was a citizen of one city. Carlyle 
was in his way learned ; Dickens was in every 
way ignorant. Dickens was an Englishman cut 

201 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

off from France ; Carlyle was a Scotsman histori- 
cally connected with France. And yet, when all 
this is said and certified, Dickens is more right 
than Carlyle. Dickens' French Revolution is 
probably more like the real French Revolution 
than Carlyle's. 

*' It is difficult (Mr. Chesterton goes on), if 
not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong 
conviction." It is so difficult, if not impossible, 
that I am glad to be able to quote Mr. Chester- 11 
ton in this connection, though at the same time 
sorry that I have been forestalled in expressing 
a precisely identical view- 

Dickens was so bountifully endowed with the 
true historic sense — that sense which visualises 
the public and divines the private life of a nation 
at each phase of its development — that it seems 
a pity he should have made his History a history 
for children written by a man, instead of a history 
for men written by a child. There never has been 
an author more jealous for the dignity of his art 
than Dickens. And yet, because his art was so 
purely instinctive, because he was so truly inspir- 
ed, because(in short) he was a genius who achiev 
ed his effects as it were by a series of gorgeous I 
flukes, Dickens mistrusted his highest powers' 
when he was tempted to match them against the \ 
Powers That Be in a new field of enterprise.} 
Like all men who are uneasily conscious of gaps; 

202 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

and lesions in their armour of learning he hesi- 
tated to usehis mighty weapons against thefeeble 
weapons of those whose armour appeared sound. 
He did not realise that, once he had knocked 
these antagonists down, their armour would pre- 
vent them from ever getting up again without as- 
sistance. 

In writing Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge^ 
and A Tale of Two Cities, he seems to have 
been wholly unaware that he was writing his- 
tory ; and having no misgivings born of any 
more serious purpose than a desire to achieve 
certain picturesque effects, he succeeded, where 
the accredited historians had failed, in giving an 
air of absolute authenticity to his description of 
peoples and periods that he had no first-hand 
knowledge of and had never studied academic- 
ally. 

As I have said elsewhere, Pickwick Papers is 
in many respects the greatest of Dickens' novels, 
a quite unique masterpiece : unique if only in its 
blending together of the finest qualities of both 
the picaresque romance and the novel of man- 
ners ; in the evidences of unexampled high spirits 
that irradiate its pages ; in its inexhaustible viv- 
acity and stupendous comic force; its nimble wit 
and inimitable drollery; its prodigality of inven- 
tion in incident andcharacter ; but, above all, in its 
fidelity to truth, which makes it perhaps the best 
mirror of an age — an era — extant in any lan- 
203 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

guage, the value of which, to history alone, is in- 
calculable. In its portrayal of the manners and 
customs, the speech and opinions and everyday 
doings of the period and the people with which 
it deals, it is beyond question or cavil one of the 
most remarkable achievements in English litera- 
ture. 

It is all this, and yet it has to do with an epoch 
that had almost passed away when Dickens was 
quite a young man. But (it will be objected) 
he could remember it all. And that is so : he 
could remember it all — but only because he was 
a genius, only because he remained a child all his 
life. The average man, you and I : what do we 
remember of the scenes and incidents, the com- 
panions and the experiences, of our childhood ? 
We remember many things, many people, that 
never were or ever could be in this world. The 
mists of time have distorted our vision so that, 
looking back, we see nothing aright. Many of us 
still think of our schoolmasters as men about nine 
feet high. Our growth has been so gradual that 
we do not seem to have grown at all. Thus we 
have lost our sense of proportion, which is only 
another name for that quality which makes one 
man in a million great, and the lack of which 
causes ninety-nine out of every hundred millions 
to misunderstand the great man. It is our lack of 
that sense which blinds us to the glory of Dick- 
ens' achievement in re-creating the environment 

204 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

and the atmosphere of the days of his childhood, 
as he did in every one of his books, but most 
notably in the most carelessly written of them all, 
Pickwick Papers. 

Dickens would have been much surprised, as 
perhaps the reader is surprised, if you had told 
him that in writing Pickimck Pape7^s he was writ- 
ing history. He would have replied that the book 
was a purely imaginative account of the imagi- 
nary doings and sayings of imaginary people. 
And he would have been both right and wrong. 
He would have been right in so far as the actual 
adventures and adventurers were spun out of 
the stuff of his dreams ; but he would have been 
wrong in the implication that they were any less 
real than sheer realities. They were more real 
than any realities, because they were more pro- 
bable, and because they gave form and unity to 
a whole world : they expressed a world in minia- 
ture. 

Isolated scenes and characters, incidents and 
utterances, though they be literal transcripts from 
life, are never so true to life as typical things and 
happenings. You will findmoretypical John Bulls 
among the cab-drivers of Paris than throughout 
the length and breadth of England, which is not 
to say, however, that John Bull is a typical French- 
man : John Bull still remains a truer type of the 
Englishman than any individual English farmer. 
205 



^ 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

And in the same way, though you search London, 
you shall not find a Cockney who is half such a 
Cockney as Sam Weller . . . who never existed, 
but who yet remains and will forever remain the 
typical Cockney. 

Dickens, in Pickwick Papers^ created a milieu 
and set a group of puppets in the midst of it that 
were more eloquent of the life and times of the 
early nineteenth century than any collection of 
real men and women in any real surroundings 
could possibly have been. In that way he made 
history dance to hispiping; inthat wayhe clothed 
its dry bones with flesh and blood and breathed 
into it the breath of life and made of it a living I 
thing. He discovered, by happy accident, that ' 
history, after all, should not be mainly a matter 
of dates and a record of the lives of kings and 
other exceptional people, but a survey of the 
gradual evolution of a nation from its primitive 
beginnings to its apogee. For just as a man is not 
to be known by his official biography, as set forth 
in the usual reference books, but by his home life, 
so it is with a nation. After a day spent in a cot- 
tage on the slopes of Plinlimmon, you will know 
far more about the Welsh than after many years 
spent in the British Museum. 

Xvi Pickwick Papers Dickens wrote history — 
but without knowing it — because he wrote about 
the commonplaces of everyday existence : those 
commonplaces which are more momentous than 

206 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

any wars and more significant than any changes 
of dynasty. In Barnaby Rudge and in A Tale of 
Two Cities Dickens wrote history — still without 
knowing it — because he wrote about the little 
people who make history and not about the big 
people who are made or marred by it. 

I f you set the real Lord George Gordon against 
the figmentary Simon Tappertit, and Dennis the 
hangman beside Hugh of the Maypole, and Fou- 
lon beside theDefarges.you will find the figments 
rather more alive than the realities, but all alike 
are stamped with the unmistakable hall-mark of 
the Dickens mintage. There was a poor unfortu- 
nate lunatic named Lord George Gordon, there 
was a hangman named Dennis, and there was a 
real Foulon. These people were born and lived 
and died. But there was never a Simon Tappertit 
or a Maypole Hugh or a Monsieur or Madame 
Defarge : that is to say, there were never any 
persons bearing those names, perhaps ; but cer- 
tainly there were countless hordes wearing their 
bodies, thinking with their brains, suffering as 
they suffered, feeling as they felt, moved by the 
same heart-stirrings. And when the scholiasts, 
like vultures, haddone picking at their dead flesh, 
leaving only the dry skeletons ; and when the 
skeletons, having been articulated by thepedants, 
had crumbled into dust, then it was the turn of 
genius, it was the heaven-appointed function of 
genius, to re-animate that dust. 
207 



1 

hes I 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

In an American edition oi A Tale of Two Cities 
there is an editorial note in which it is said that 
" one book for which Dickens is reputed to have 
had a special liking, and of which he never tired, 
was Carlyle's History of the French Revolution^ 
and while working on the Tale of Two Cities he 
asked Carlyle if he might see one of the works 
referred to in the History, whereupon Carlyle 
packed up and sent down to Gadshill all his re- 
ference volumes, and Dickens read them faith- 
fully and to profitable use." Did he ? I find no 
warrant for the statement. It is probable that 
Dickens read The French Revolution pretty 
thoroughly. We know that he did at least dip 
into Mercier's Tableau de Paris, and it is very 
likely that he read a good deal of Rousseau. But 
beyond those limits (I feel pretty sure) his study 
of the period did not extend. For the rest he re- 
lied on his natural powers of entering into and 
visualising the life of any people at any period. 
And why not ? I f he had set himself to write The 
Last Days of Pompeii I have every reason to be- 
lieve that it would have been a far better romance 
than Bulwer Lytton's. 

Those of Dickens' Adventures in History \ 
which should, however, intrigue us most are con- 
cerned with his presentment of certain authentic 
historical figures, with Sir John Chester, who was 
obviously founded on Lord Chesterfield, with 

208 



t 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

Lord George Gordon, with Dennis, and in a les- 
ser degree, Foulon. Grip the raven, Stry ver, and 
Sydney Carton may also, for convenience' sake, 
I think be allowed to come within the scope of this 
chapter. 

It has been said that Sydney Carton was 
founded on another purely imaginary character, 
Richard Wardour, the hero of Wilkie Collins' 
play, The Frozen Deep, in which Dickens acted 
with his friends and his children during the sum- 
mer of 1857. Life is short, of making many books 
there is no end, and so I have never read The 
Frozen Deep. Nevertheless I scout the sugges- 
tion that Dickens could ever have been indebted 
to any other writer — or indeed anybody — for any 
least part of his material. That the notion for the 
book came to him whilst he was engaged in these 
amateur theatricals Dickens himself admits, and 
there was afterwards found this note in his manu- 
script book : ** How as to a story in two periods 
— with a lapse of time between, like a French 
Drama? Titles for such a notion." Follows a long 
list of titles. Then "The drunken? — dissipated? 
— What? — Lion — and his Jackal and Primer, 
stealing down to him at unwonted hours." And 
then, foreshadowing Jerry Cruncher and his wife : 
"A man, and his wife — or daughter — or niece. 
The man, a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or 
girl) with good in her, and with compunctions. 
He believes nothing, and defies everything ; yet 
209 o 






THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

has suspicions always that she is praying against 
his evil schemes, and making them go wrong. 
He isverymuch opposed to this, and is always an- 
grily harping on it. * If she vtust pray, why can't 
she pray in their favour, instead of going against 
'em ? She's always ruining me — she always is — 
and calls that Duty ! There's a religious person ! » 
Calls it Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go 
sneaking against me ! " 

It is enough. One has only to bring these j 
rumours into the light of day to find that they j 
crumble into just a little dirt upon our hands. 

Of Stryver, who is described as "a man of little 
more than thirty but looking twenty years older 
than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free of any 
drawback of delicacy . . . (he) had a pushing 
way of shouldering himself (morally and physi- 
cally) into companies and conversations, that ar- f 
gued well for his shouldering his way up in life;" 
of the prototype of Stryver Mr. Edmund Yates 
affirms that he was drawn from a Mr. Edwin 
James, a well-known legal functionary in his time. 
Says Mr. Yates: "One day I took Dickens — 
who had never seen Edwin James — to a consul- 
tation. Mr. James laid himself out to be speci- 
ally agreeable ; Dickens was quietly observant. 
About four months after appeared the early num- 
bers oiA Tale of Two Cities, in which a promi- 
nent part was played by Mr. Stryver. After 
reading the description I said to Dickens: *Stry- > 

2IO 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

ver is a good likeness!' He smiled. ' Not bad, 
I think,' he said, ' especially after only one sit- 
ting. 

Between Mr. Stryver with his rusty robes and 
lurid face, and Grip the raven with his rusty 
plumage and lurid beak, I seem to discern a gro- 
tesque likeness. Of Grip Dickens writes in his 
Preface to Barnaby Rudge: 

The late Mr. Waterton having, some time ago, 
expressed his opinion that ravens are gradually 
becoming extinct in England, I offered the few 
following words about my experience of these 
birds. 

The raven in this story is a compound of two 
great originals, of whom I was at different times 
the proud possessor. The first was in the bloom 
of his youth when he was discovered in a modest 
retirement in London by a friend of mine, and 
given to me. He had from the first, as Sir Hugh 
Evans says of Anne Page, "good gifts," which he 
improved by study and attention in a most ex- 
emplary manner. He slept in a stable — generally 
on horseback — and so terrified a Newfoundland 
dog by his preternatural sagacity, that he has 
been known, by the mere superiority of his 
genius, to walk off unmolested with the dog's 
dinner from before his face. He was rapidly ris- 
ing in acquirements and virtues when in an evil 
hour his stable was newly painted. He observed 

211 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the workmen closely, saw that they were careful 
of the paint, and immediately burned to possess 
it. On their going to dinnerhe ate up all they had 
left behind, consisting of a pound or two of white 
lead ; and this youthful indiscretion terminated 
in death. 

While I was yet inconsolable for his loss, an- 
other friend of mine in Yorkshire discovered an 
older and more gifted raven at a village public- 
house, which he prevailed upon the landlord to 
part with for a consideration, and sent up to me. 
The first act of this sage was to administer to the 
effects of his predecessor by disinterring all the 
cheese and halfpence he had buried in the garden 
— a work of immense labour and research, to 
which he devoted all the energies of his mind. 
When he had achieved his task, he applied him- 
self to the acquisition of stable language, in which 
he soon became such an adept that he would 
perch outside my window and drive imaginary 
horses with great skill, all day. Perhaps even I 
never saw him at his best, for his former master 
sent his duty with him, "and if I wished the bird 
to come out very strong, would I be so good as to 
show him a drunken man" — which I never did, 
having (unfortunately) none but sober people at 
hand. But I could hardly have respected him 
more, whatever the stimulating influences of this 
sight might have been. He had not the least re- 
spect, I am sorry to say, for me in return, or for 

212 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

anybody but the cook, to whom he was attached 
— but only, I fear, as a Policeman might have 
been. Once I met him unexpectedly, about a 
mile from my house, walking down the middle of 
a public street, attended by a pretty large crowd, 
and spontaneously exhibiting the whole of his 
accomplishments. His gravity under these try- 
ing circumstances I can never forget, nor the ex- 
traordinary gallantry with which, refusing to be 
brought home, he defended himself behind a 
pump, until overpowered by numbers. It may 
have been that he was too bright a genius to live 
long, or it may have been that he took some 
pernicious substance into his bill, and thence into 
his maw — which is not improbable, seeing that 
he new-pointed the greater part of the garden- 
wall by digging out the mortar, broke countless 
squares of glass by scraping away the putty all 
round the frames, and tore up and swallowed, in 
splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase 
of six steps and a landing — but after some three 
years he too was taken ill, and died before the 
kitchen fire. He kept his eyes to the last upon 
the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over 
on his back with a sepulchral cry of " Cuckoo ! " 
Since then I have been ravenless. 

In Barnaby Rtcdge, Lord George Gordon, and 
in A Tale of Two Cities, Foulon, are drawn 
directly from life. Let us contrast Carlyle's pre- 
213 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

sentment of Foulon with that of Dickens'. First, 
Carlyle : 

This is that same Foulon named dme damnde 
du P ar lenient ; a man grown grey in treachery, 
in griping, projecting, intriguing, and iniquity: 
who once when it was objected, to some finance 
scheme of his, "What will the people do?" — 
made answer, in the fire of discussion, "The 
people may eat grass : " hasty words, which fly 
abroad irrevocable, — and will send back tidings. 
... As for old Foulon, one learns that he is dead ; 
at least " a sumptuous funeral " is going on; the 
undertakers honouring him, if no other will . . . 
but . . . hardly above a week since the Bastille 
fell ... it suddenly appears that old Foulon is 
alive ; nay, that he is here, in early morning, in 
the streets of Paris : the extortioner, the plotter, 
who would make the people eat grass, and was a 
liar from the beginning ! — It is even so. The de- 
ceptive " sumptuous funeral " (of some domestic 
that died) ; the hiding-place at Vitry toward Fon- 
tainebleau, have not availed that wretched old 
man. Somelivingdomestic or dependant, for none 
loves Foulon, has betrayed him to the Village. , 
Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him ; pounce on ■ 
him, like hell-hounds : Westward, old Infamy ; 
to Paris, to be judged at the Hotel-de-Ville ! His 
old head, which seventy-four years have bleach- 
ed, is bare ; they have tied an emblematic bundle 

214 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

of grass on his back ; a garland of nettles and 
thistles is round his neck : in this manner ; led with 
ropes ; goaded on with curses and menaces must 
he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward ; the piti- 
ablest, most unpitied of all old men. 

Sooty Saint-Antoine, and every street, mus- 
ters its crowd as he passes ; — the Hall of the 
Hotel-de-Ville, the Place de Greve itself, will 
hardly hold his escort and him. Foulon must not 
only be judged righteously, but judged there 
where he stands, without any delay. Appoint sev- 
en judges, ye Municipals, or seventy-and-seven ; 
name them yourselves, or we will name them : 
but judge him ! . . . " Friends," said " a person 
in good clothes," stepping forward , "what is the 
use of judging this man? Has he not been judg- 
ed these thirty years?" With wild yells, Sanscu- 
lottism clutches him in its hundred hands: he is 
whirled acrossthe Place de Greve, to theZ^?^/^r«^, 
Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue 
de la Vannerie ; pleading bitterly for life — to the 
deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two 
ropes break, and thequiveringvoice still pleaded) 
can he be so much as got hanged ! His Body is 
dragged through the streets ; his Head goes 
aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass : amid 
sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people. 

And now, Dickens, thus : 

The men were terrible in the bloody-minded 
215 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

anger with which they looked from windows, 
caught up what arms they had, and came pour- 
ing down into the streets ; but, the women were 
a sight to chill the boldest. From such household 
occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from 
their children, from their aged and their sick 
crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, 
they ran out with streaming hair, urging one an- 
other, and themselves, to madness with the wild- 
est cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my 
sister! Old Foulon taken, my brother! Miscreant 
Foulon taken, my daughter ! Then, a score of 
others ran into the midst of these, beating their 
breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon 
alive ! Foulon who told the starving people they 
might eat grass ! Foulon who told my old father 
that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to 
give him ! Foulon who told my baby that it might 
suck grass, when these breasts were dry with 
want ! Oh, mother of God, this Foulon ! Oh, 
Heaven, our suffering ! Hear me, my dead baby 
and my withered father: I swear on my knees, 
on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon ! Hus- 
bands and brothers and young men. Give us the 
blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, 
Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body 
and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon in pieces, and 
dighiminto the ground, that grass may grow from 
him ! With these cries, numbers of the women, 
lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking 

216 




I'HI I.I I' DO KM IK s I,', \ HOPE, EARL OF CHEM (• Kt If. i u 
"Sir fohn Chester" 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

and tearing at their own friends until they dropp- 
ed in a passionate swoon, and were only saved 
by the men belonging to them from being tram- 
pled under foot. 

They march to the Hotel de Ville, where the 
prisoner is on trial, and there wait impatiently, 
" during two or three hours of drawl and the win- 
nowing of many bushels of words," until 

at length the sun rose so high that it struck a 
kindly ray, as of hope or protection, directly down 
upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was too 
much to bear ; in an instant the barrier of dust 
and chaff, that had stood surprisingly long, went 
to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him ! 

It was known directly, to the furthest confines 
of the crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a rail- 
ing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch 
in a deadly embrace — Madame Defarge had but 
followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes 
with which he was tied — The Vengeance and 
Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and 
the men at the windows had not yet swooped into 
the hall, like birds of prey from their high perches 
— when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, 
" Bring him out ! Bring him to the lamp ! " 

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps 
of the building ; now on his knees ; now on his 
feet ; now on his back ; dragged, and struck at, 
217 



1 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that 
were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands ; 
torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always en- 
treating and beseeching for mercy; now, full of ve- 
hement agony of action, with a small clear space 
about him as the people drew one another back 
that they might see ; now, a log of dead wood 
drawn through a forest of legs ; he was hauled to 
the nearest street-corner where one of the fatal 
lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let 
him go — as a cat might have done to a mouse — ^ | 
and silently and composedly looked at him while ' 
they made ready and while he besought her : the 
women passionately screeching at him all the 
time, and the men sternly calling out to have him 
killed with grass in his mouth. Once he went 
aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him, 
shrieking ; twice he went aloft, and the rope 
broke, and they caught him, shrieking ; then the 
rope was merciful and held him, and his head was 
soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth 
for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of. 



Carlyle had dredged for his facts in all the 
seven seas of literature that had been poured forth 
on the subject of the French Revolution. He had 
culled his knowledge of Foulon and the rest from 
a hundred abstruse and recondite sources. Dick- 
ens had read . . . only Carlyle, some fragments 
of De Mercier, and perhaps Rousseau. Yet his 

2J2 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

pictures of that wild time are as full and complete 
and vivid in their truth as if he had steeped him- 
self in contemporary lore. 

Carlyle may indeed be said to have introduced 
the Spiritof the French Revolutionto the English 
people ; but it was Dickens who raised its body 
from the dead. 

" No account of the Gordon Riots has been to 
my knowledge introduced into any Work of Fic- 
tion, and the subject presenting very extraordi- 
nary and remarkable features, I was led to project 
this Tale, "says Dickens in hisPre/aceio Barnaby 
Rudge. 

Of his description of the Riots Forster says, 
very justly and aptly : 

There are few things more masterly in any of 
his books. From the first low mutterings of the 
storm to its last terrible explosion, the frantic out- 
break of popular ignorance and rage is depicted 
with unabated power. The aimlessness of idle 
mischief by which the ranks of the rioters are 
swelled at the beginning; the recklessness induc- 
ed by the monstrous impunity allowed to the ear- 
ly excesses; the sudden spread of drunken guilt 
into every haunt of poverty, ignorance, or mis- 
chief in the wicked old city, in which such rich 
materials of crime lie festering ; the wild action 
of its poison on all, without scheme or plan of any 
219 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

kind, who come within its reach ; the horrors that 
are more bewildering for so complete an absence 
of purpose in them ; and, when all is done, the 
misery found to have been self-inflicted in every 
cranny and corner of London, as if a plague had 
swept over the streets ; these are features in the 
picture of an actual occurrence, to which the man- 
ner of the treatment gives extraordinary force and 
meaning. 

" Mr. Dennis the hangman (he adds) is a por- 
trait that Hogarth would have painted with the 
samewholesome severity of satireemployed upon 
it in Barnaby RudgeT From which it would ap- 
pear that Forster did not know, none of Dickens' 
commentators seem to know, that there was in- 
deed a real Dennis, a hangman of Newgate, who 
was executed for his share in the Riots of 1780. 

Of the unwitting instigator of those riots. Lord 
George Gordon, Dickens gives this impression 
which may be compared with the actual portrait 
of that poor misguided maniac : 

i 
The lord, the great personage, who did the May- 
pole so muchhonour, was about themiddleheight, 
of a slender make, and sallow complexion, with 
an aquiline nose, and longhair of a reddish brown, 
combed perfectly straight and smooth about his 
ears, and slightly powdered, but without the faint- 
est vestige of a curl. He was attired, under his 

220 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

greatcoat, in a full suit of black, quite free from 
any ornament, and of the most precise and sober 
cut. The gravity of his dress, together with a 
certain lankness of cheek and stiffness of deport- 
ment, added nearly ten years to his age, but his 
figure was that of one not yet past thirty. As he 
stood musing in the red glow of the fire, it was 
striking to observe his very bright large eye, 
which betrayed a restlessness of thought and 
purpose, singularly at variance with the studied 
composure and sobriety of his mien, and with his 
quaint and sad apparel. It had nothing harsh or 
cruel inits expression; neither had his face, which 
was thin and mild, and wore an air of melancholy ; 
but it was suggestive of an air of indefinable un- 
easiness, which infected those who looked upon 
him, and filled them with a kind of pity for the 
man : though why it did so, they would have been 
at some trouble to explain. 

A formal biography of the real Lord George 
Gordon is set forth in Chambers' Encyclopcedia^ 
thus : 

He was born in London, 26th December, 1751, 
the third son of the third Duke of Gordon. From 
Eton he entered the Navy, and rose to be lieuten- 
ant, but quitted the service during the American 
War, after a dispute with the Admiralty. Elected 
in 1774 M.P. for the pocket borough of Ludgers- 
221 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

hall, Wiltshire, he presently attacked both sides 
with such freedom as to give rise to the saying 
that there "were three parties in parliament — 
the ministry, the opposition, and Lord George 
Gordon." Still he displayed considerable talent 
in debate, and no deficiency of wit or argument. 
A bill having, in 1778, passed the legislature for 
the relief of Roman Catholics from certain penal- 
ties and disabilities, the Protestant Association 
of London was, among other societies, formed for 
the purpose of procuring its repeal, and in No- 
vember 1779 Lord George was elected its presi- 
dent. On 2nd June, 1780, he headed a vast and 
excited mob of 50,000 persons, who, decked with 
blue cockades, marched in procession from St. 
George's Fields to the House of Commons to 
present a petition for the repeal of the measure. 
Dreadful riots ensued in the metropolis, lasting 
five days, in the course of which many Catholic 
chapels and private dwelling-houses, Newgate 
prison, and the mansion of the chief-justice, Lord | 
Mansfield, were destroyed. The magistrates' 
feared to read the Riot Act, but at length, on the 
7th, when thirty-six fires were blazing at once, the 
troops were called out by the king, and every- 
where drove the rioters before them, 210 being 
killed, 248 wounded, and 135 arrested, of whom 
21 were afterwards executed. Property to the , 
amount of 180,000 pounds had been destroyed in 
the riots. . . . Lord George himself was tried for 

222 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

high treason ; but Erskine's defence got him off 
on the ground of absence of treasonable design. 
His subsequent conduct seemed that of a person 
of unsound mind. Having, in 1786, refused to 
come forward as a witness in a court of law, he 
was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Can- 
terbury for contempt. In i y^j he was convicted, 
on two official informations, for a pamphlet re- 
flecting on the laws and criminal justice of the 
country, and for publishing a libel on Marie An- 
toinette and the French Ambassador in London. 
To evade sentence he retired to Holland, but was 
sent back to England, and apprehended at Bir- 
mingham. He died in Newgate of fever, ist No- 
vember 1 793, having latterly become a proselyte 
to Judaism. 

In 1 795 \}ci^x^vi2iS2L.LifeofLordGeorge Gordon 
published. It was written by one Dr. Robert 
Watson, and some vindication of the hapless 
peer's character was attempted in the work. It 
does not seem likely that Dickens ever read this 
book ; but certainly his own kindly treatment of 
Lord George has long since superseded the more 
elaborate apologia. 

To mymind there is something almost eerie in 
the power that Dickens displays in limning this 
extraordinary figure of history. In hisPre/ace he 
goes out of his way to declare that 

It is unnecessary to say that those shameful tu- 
223 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

mults, while they reflect indelible disgrace upon 
the time in which they occurred, and all who had 
act or part in them, teach a good lesson. That 
what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised 
by men who have no religion, and who in their 
daily practice set at naught the commonest prin- 
ciples of right and wrong ; that it is begotten of 
intolerance and persecution ; that it is senseless, 
besotted, inveterate, and unmerciful, all History 
teaches us. But perhaps we do not know it in our 
hearts too well, to profit by even so humble an I 
example as the "No Popery" riots of 1780. How- 
ever imperfectly these disturbances are set forth 
in the followingpages,they are impartially painted 
by one who has no sympathy with the Romish 
Church, though he acknowledges, as most men 
do, some esteemed friends among the followers 
of its creed. 

I don't like that concluding sentence: it savours 
of pragmatism; but Idolike, Idoadmire,and I do 
marvel at the boundless sympathy which could em- 
brace and understand and condone the strange 
self-sacrificial madness of a poor deluded fanatic. 

It would have been so fatally easy, you would 
think, for Dickens to perpetrate the most ghastly 
blunders inhis treatment of Lord George Gordon. 
If, in my cynical youth, I had not already read 
Barnaby Rudge, and yet happened to know its 
theme, I believe I should have hesitated to read 

224 




LORD MANSFIELD 
Barnaby Rudge 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

it. I should have been afraid of coming across yet 
another repetition in another guise of that offence 
which, in Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity 
Shop, has caused so much pain to countless thou- 
sands of splendid Puritans and for ever alienated 
them from Dickens. I should have dreaded to 
find him making hay of the most sacred and sol- 
emn convictions of more than half the population 
of Europe. A Father Melchizedec Howler, or a 
Monsignor Stiggins, would have been such an 
outrage upon an ancient, stately, and dignified 
faith as might have shattered even my fealty to- 
ward the greatest English novelist of any age. 
Stiggins and Howler and Chadband : all these, 
being new and raw, were fair butts for derision 
and ridicule ; but a Roman Catholic priest . . . ! 
I need have had no fears, however. I should have 
no fears now. Dickens is sometimes alittle coarse 
and even gross, but he is never — in spite of all 
the New Criticisms — vulgar. His sense of hu- 
mour fails him over and over again, most lament- 
ably, but never his sense of decency. He is often 
fierce and furious, wild and whirling ; but never 
hysterical. He is often loud, but never lewd ; 
often trite, but never banal. So, when he came to 
grips with this silly infatuate peer, and had to 
handle a type of mind with which his own essen- 
tially healthy mind could not possibly have any- 
thing whatever in common, it is his innate, in- 
domitable sanity, it is his immutable perception 
225 p 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

of the eternal fitness of things, that saves him, 
that does more than save him, that uplifts him to 
the level of the martyr on the cross and lends him 
divine insight into the meaning of those supernal 
dreams for the sake of which countless millions 
have poured out their blood like water totheglory, 
not so much of their gods, asof their owngod-like 
souls. 

History would try to persuade me that the 
secretary of Lord George Gordon was not such a 
man as Gashford ; that he was a man of probity 
and courage and intellect, a sort of sublimation of 
John Grueby, Lord George's sturdy henchman, 
of whom we have all too little in Barnaby Rudge. 
But this I steadfastly refuse to believe. I believe 
in Dickens' Gashford, tall 

. . . angularly made, high-shouldered, bony, 
and ungraceful. His dress, in imitation of his 
superior, was demure and staid in the extreme; 
his manner formal and constrained. This gentle- 
man had an overhanging brow, great hands and 
feet and ears, and a pair of eyes that seemed to 
have made an unnatural retreat into his head, 
and to have dug themselves a cave to hide in. 
His manner was smooth and humble, but very 
sly and slinking. He wore the aspect of a man 
who was always lying in wait for something that 
wouldnH come to pass; but he looked patient — 
very patient — and fawned like a spaniel dog. 

226 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

Even now, while he rubbed and warmed his 
hands before the blaze, he had the air of one who 
only presumed to enjoy it in his degree as a com- 
moner ; and though he knew his lord was not re- 
garding him, he looked into his face from time to 
time, and with a meek and deferential manner, 
smiled as if for practice. 

That, or something akin to it, is the type that 
does invariably attach itself to the poor profligate 
and spendthrift, whoever he may be, and whether 
he be prodigal of his money, or of his manhood, 
of his faith, or of his unfaith. Gashford is a living 
symbol of the evil genius that waits upon the 
generous weakness of all good men who have 
anything to lose. It is the slimy cunning of the 
Gashfords of this world that exploits the folly and 
the goodness of simpler, nobler natures, turns 
their potential beneficence into active mischief, 
covers their innocence with shame, and corrupts 
their purity. Dickens never evinced a nicer ap- 
preciation or a more acute perception of the sort 
of combinations that do usually go to the mak- 
ing of colossal ruin and disaster than in this strik- 
ing juxtaposition of Gashford with Lord George. 
History denies the truth of this presentment of 
the secretary. That only proves that these Gash- 
fords, as well as being consummate rascals, are 
consummate hypocrites also. It is History that 
has been deceived, not Dickens. 
227 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Remains to be consideredthe figureof Sir John 
Chester, who is, transparently, Lord Chester- 
field. 



He was a staid, grave, placid gentleman, some- 
thing past the prime of life, yet upright in his 
carriage for all that, and slim as a greyhound. He 
was well mounted upon a sturdy chestnut cob, 
and had the graceful seat of an experienced horse- 
man ; while his riding gear, though free from such 
fopperies as were then in vogue, was handsome 
and well chosen. He wore a ridingf-coat of a 
somewhat brighter green than might have been 
expected to suit the taste of a gentleman of his 
years, with a short black velvet cape, and laced 
pocket-holes and cuffs, all of a jaunty fashion ; il 
his linen too was of the finest kind, worked in a 
rich pattern at the wrists and throat, and scrupu- , 
lously white. Although he seemed, judging from i{ 
the mud he had picked up on the way, to have 
come from London, his horse was as smooth and 
cool as his ovvn iron-grey periwig and pigtail. 
Neither man nor beast had turned a single hair ; 
and savingfor his soiledskirts and spatterdashes, 
this gentleman with his blooming face, white ' 
teeth, exactly-ordered dress, and perfectcalmness, : 
might have come from making an elaborate and 
leisurely toilet, to sit for an equestrian portrait at 
old John Willet's gate. 

In the privacy of his apartments in the Temple 

228; 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

he muses upon the graces and the virtues of his 
famous prototype. 



" My Lord Chesterfield," he said ... " if I could 
but have profited by your genius soon enough to 
have formed my son on the model you have left 
to all wise fathers, both he and I would have been 
rich men. Shakespeare was undoubtedly very 
fine in his way; Milton good, though prosy; Lord 
Bacon, deep, and decidedly knowing ; but the 
writer who should be his country's pride is my 
Lord Chesterfield. . . . 

" I thought I was tolerably accomplished as 
a man of the world," he continued, " I flattered 
myself that I was pretty well versed in all those 
little arts and graces which distinguish men of 
the world from boors and peasants, and separate 
their character from those intensely vulgar sen- 
timents which are called the national character. 
Apart from any natural prepossession in my own 
favour, I believed I was. Still, in every page of 
this enlightened writer, I find some captivating 
hypocrisy which has never occurred to me before, 
or some superlative piece of selfishness to which 
I was utterly a stranger. I should quite blush 
for myself before this stupendous creature, if, re- 
membering his precepts, one might blush at any- 
thing. An amazing man ! a nobleman indeed •' 
any King or Queen may make a Lord, but only 
229 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the Devil himself — and the Graces — can make 
a Chesterfield." 

Men (adds Dickens in a bitter commentary) 
who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try 
to hide these vices from themselves ; and yet, in 
the very act of avowing them, they lay claim to 
the virtues they feign most to despise. " For," 
say they, " this is honesty, this is truth. All man- 
kind are like us, but they have not the candour 
to avow it." The more they affect to deny the 
existence of any sincerity in the world, the more 
they would be thought to possess it in its boldest 
shape; and this is an unconscious compliment to 
Truth on the part of these philosophers which 
will turn the laugh against them to the Day of 
Judgment. 

Thereissomethinghereofthatnarrow-minded 
intolerance which is very characteristic of a cer- 
tain type of demagogue all the world over. And 
Dickens belonged to that type. He had all the 
average demagogue's cocksureness and impa- 
tience of what he does not understand, together 
with the good-humoured disdain born of self- 
complacency that commonly accompanies it and 
vents itself in vigorous ridicule. Yet he does suc- 
ceed in getting Sir John Chester down on paper, 
and the philosophy of the elegant man of fashion, 
cynic, and wit is as appropriate to a certain mod- 
ern type as it was, in a way, to its first exponent, 

230 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

Lord Chesterfield, on whom Sir John Chester is 
reputably founded. 

But . . . Dickens is so obsessed by a melo- 
dramatic convention that he draws Lord Ches- 
terfield — or Sir John Chester — as an extremely 
handsome and debonair gentleman, ignoring the 
fact (if he ever knew it) that the real Lord 
Chesterfield, in spite of his courtly accomplish- 
ments, was of unimposing presence and rather 
distinctly plain-looking, a man whose career was 
uniformly mediocre, and whose ambitions were 
gratified neither by success in public life nor in 
court society. He was, according to his contem- 
poraries, an enlightened statesman, an orator, a 
conspicuous wit, and a man of almost universal 
talents ; and yet he is only remembered as the 
author of the famous letters written to his natural 
son, Philip Stanhope. Son of the third Earl of 
Chesterfield, he studied at Cambridge, made the 
grand tour, and sat in the House of Commons 
as member for Saint Germans in Cornwall from 
1716 to 1726, when he succeeded his father as 
fourth earl. In 1 730 he was made Lord Steward 
of the Household. Until then, as a Whig, he had 
supported Walpole; but being ousted from office 
for voting against an excise bill, he went over to 
the opposition, and was one of Walpole's bitter- 
est antagonists. He was above bribes, and, ac- 
cording to his lights, an honest statesman and a 
true patriot. He joined the Pelham Ministry in 
231 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

1744 ; in 1745-6 was a judicious, able, and con- 
ciliatory Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; and was in 
1746 one of the principal Secretaries of State, but 
in 1748 was compelled by ill-health and deaf- 
ness to retire from public life. During the brief 
period of his political power he was on terms of 
some intimacy with Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke, 
and he patronised Colley Gibber and many other 
men of letters. He died, a lonely, neglected, for- 
gotten old man, in 1773. 

But it was of course to be expected that Dick- 
ens, knowing nothing of the class to which Lord 
Chesterfield belonged, and being utterly incap- 
able of appreciating the aristocraticpoint of view, 
should have been taken in by Lord Chesterfield's 
pose, should have accepted him at his own valua- 
tion, and confounded the purely artificial writer 
with the natural man. But that he did catch the 
tone of his Letters I think may be established by 
the following medley of original and parody : 

Men who converse only with women are frivolous, 
effeminate puppies ; and those who never con- 
verse with them are bears. 

The world is a lively place enough, in which we 
must accommodate ourselves to circumstances, 
sail with the stream as glibly as we can, be con- 
tent to take froth for substance, the surface for the 
depth, the counterfeit for the real coin. I wonder 

232 



t 



I 




LORD GEORGE GORDON 



OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 

that no philosopher has ever established that our 
globe itself is hollow. It should be, if Nature is 
consistent in her works. 

Dissimulation to a certain degree is as necessary 
in business as clothes are in the common inter- 
course of life ; and a man would be as imprudent 
who should exhibit his inside naked, as he would 
be indecent if he produced his outside so. 

All men are fortune-hunters, are they not ? The 
law, the church, the court, the camp — see how 
they are all crowded with fortune-hunters, jostling 
each other in the pursuit. The Stock Exchange, 
the pulpit, the counting-house, theroyal drawing- 
room, the senate — what but fortune-hunters are 
they filled with } 

Advice is seldom welcome ; and those who want 
it the most always like it the least. 



CHAPTER THE TENTH 
CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 



CHAPTER THE . 

TENTH CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

MR. ARNOLD BENNETT HAS SAID 
somewhere that he never realised there was any- 
thing picturesque about the Five Towns until he 
read an impression of them in one of Mr. George 
Moore's novels. And Mr. J.'M.Barrie was aston- 
ished to find that anybody could be interested in 
his native place, Kirriemuir. I n these confessions 
both these authors are merely restating one of 
those elusive truths that only artists seem to be 
able to lay firm hold upon. A lover cannot tell^ 
you what his sweetheart is like so that you would 
recognise her in the street. He could as easily 
describe his boots or his mother. The things with 
which we are most familiar are always the hardest 
to describe. The things we know best — the things 
we cherish and believe in — our more intimate 
hopes and fears and doubts — the emotions we 
hold most sacred — the strongest passions that 
actuate us — none of these can we translate quite 
adequately into words. There would seem to be 
an undiscovered language. It is perhaps the lan- 
guage that all artists spendtheirlives in learning, 
and die without mastering. 

The other day I was arguing with a friend 
about Mr. Harry Lauder. I had read, or been 
told, that he was born in Lancashire. And my 
friend, a Scotsman, said that that was manifestly 
impossible. Only a Scotsman (said he) could 
237 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS I 

sing Scotch songs as Mr. Lauder sings them. 
I asked, then, why Mr. Lauder had started hisi 
career by singing Irish songs ? And from that I 
got to considering why it was that a man has to 
get away from a thing in order to see it properly, 
as it actually is, in due proportion and perspec-i 
tive. Mr. Lauder mayor may not have been born 
in Scotland. But of one thing I am sure, which is 
that, in either case, he spent some years of his' 
childhood or youth in Scotland, that he then left 
Scotland, and then, returning to it, saw Scotsmen 
for the first time as they really are. If he had 
lived in Scotland all his life he never would have 
been able to impersonate Scotsmen as he does. 
Many a Cockney can give an excellent imitation 
of a yokel ; but never a Cockney could imperson- 
ate a Cockney on the stage. The only good stage 
Cockney I have ever seen, Mr. Albert Chevalier, 
is half a Frenchman and, half a Welshman, I be- 
lieve. And as in the art of acting, so it is in the 
art of writing. It is not until you have got out of 
the environment in which you were born that you 
can depict that environment convincingly. 

Dickens, in his two first books, Pickwick 
Papers dind Oliver Twis^, writes of people and in- 
cidents that had only come casually and superfi- 
cially within his own experience, if at all. What t 
did he know of country-house life."* of leisure- ii 
ly travelling in England? of sport? He knew| 
a great deal about country inns, stage-coaches 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

and stage-coach-drivers and inn-keepers and 
waiters and ostlers and so on, and about Parlia- 
mentary elections, and the processes of the law, 
and lawyers and lawyers' clerks and all that entour- 
age; he knew of these things because he had come 
fresh to the study of them in his impression- 
able youth or early manhood. He was familiar 
with, and he could describe, a debtors' prison. 
But, he had not got sufficiently far away from the 
Marshalsea to be able to describe that. So, he 
elected to describe the Fleet Prison, which he did 
not know very intimately, rather than the Mar- 
shalsea, which he did know very intimately in- 
deed. 

And in Oliver Twist, though he knew no more 
than the average man about criminals and work- 
houses, we find him choosing his chief characters 
from among the criminal classes and from among 
the inmates of a workhouse. 

It was not until he was fairly launched on his 
third book, Nicholas Nickleby, that he began to 
deal faithfully with the kind of people he had 
been brought up amongst ; and by that time his 
fame and prosperity had lifted him high enough 
out of his original environment to enable him to 
perceive its artisticpossibilities. In the Kenwigs 
group he gives us his first full-length portraits of 
the kind of grotesques whom we most commonly 
think of nowadays as Dickensy types. 

Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, and Fagin are 
239 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

all lay-figures : mere dummies that Dickens 
somehow contrives to galvanise into horrible life. 
I have said before that there never was a pro 
fessional burglar who remotely resembled Bill 
Sikes. Andnever was therean expert pickpocket 
who remotely resembled the Artful Dodger. A 
pickpocket whowore a suitofclothes several sizes 
too large for him, with long sleeves clumsily 
turned up at the cuffs so that they must have 
hampered the free movement of his hands, and 
whose whole appearance was conspicuous and 
suspicious, never did or could or would attain to 
any proficiency in his nefarious calling. Thieves 
of all kinds have to look, if possible, more honest 
than honest men if they are to achieve any suc- 
cess. They must be, in all outward seeming, so 
ordinary as never to attract a second glance from 
any one ; least of all the policeman. 

And Fagin the fence . . .? 

Receivers of stolen property are more likely to 
be found on view behind their counters all the 
week, and in chapel on Sundays, than in foul 
dens in evil neighbourhoods. Dickens, in Oliver 
Twisty projected his den of thieves out of his in- 
ner consciousness. Obviously he had no first- 
hand knowledge whatever of any kindof criminal. 
He knew nothing of their habits or manners or 
customs. Even their speech he was unfamiliar 
with, or he would never have made Sikes utter 
such preposterous oaths as " Wolves tear your 

240 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

throats ! " He had got his details all wrong ; and 
yet had got his effects so marvellously right, 
somehow, that his very blunders are more con- 
vincing than all the meticulous accuracies of the 
modern realist. 

Fagin was, I think, founded on the personality 
of a famous rogue named Ikey Solomons; and as 
no other Dickens commentator seems to have 
discovered the identity of this gentleman I pro- 
pose to quote Major Arthur Griffiths — sometime 
Governor of Newgate Prison — concerning his 
career. 

■ At no period (says Major Griffiths^) could thieves 

' in London or elsewhere have prospered had they 
been unable to dispose of their ill-gotten goods. 
The trade of fence or receiver, therefore, is very 
nearly as old as the crimes which it so obviously 
fostered. One of the most notorious, and for a 
time most successful practitioners in this illicit 
trade, passed through Newgate in 1831. The 

Tname of Ikey Solomons was long remembered 
by thief and thief-taker. He began as an itine- 
rant street vendor at eight, at ten he passed bad 
money, at fourteen he was a pickpocket and a 
"duffer," or a seller of sham goods. He early 

''saw the profits to be made out of purchasing 
stolen goods, but could not embark in it at first 

* Chivnicles of Newgate, 
241 Q 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

for want of capital. He was taken up when still 
in his teens for stealing a pocket-book, and was 
sentenced to transportation, but did not get be- 
yond the hulks at Chatham. On his release an 
uncle, a slop-seller in Chatham, gave him a situa- 
tion as " barker," or salesman, at which he real- 
ised ^150 within a couple of years. With this 
capital he returned to London and set up as a 
fence. He had such great aptitude for business 
and such a thorough knowledge of the real value 
of goods, that he was soon admitted to be one of 
the best judges known of all kinds of property, 
from a glass bottle to a five hundredguinea chro- 
nometer. But he never paid more than a fixed 
price for all articles of the same class, whatever 
their intrinsic value. Thus a watch was paid for as 
a watch, whether it was of gold or silver ; a piece 
of linen as such, whether the stuff was coarse or 
fine. This rule of dealing with stolen goods con- 
tinues to this day, and has made the fortune of 
many since I key. 

Solomons also established a system of pro- 
vincial agency, by which stolen goods were 
passed on from London to the seaports, and so 
abroad. Jewels were re-set, diamonds re-faced ; 
all marks by which other articles might be identi- 
fied, the selvages of linen, the stamps on shoes, 
the numbers and names on watches, were care- 
fully removed or obliterated after the goods 
passed out of his hands. On one occasion the 

242 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

whole of the proceeds of a robbery from a boot- 
shop was traced to Solomons ; the owner came 
with the police, and was morally convinced that 
it was his property, but could not positively 
identify it, and I key defied them to remove a 
single shoe. In the end the injured bootmaker 
agreed to buy back his stolen stock at the price 
Solomons had paid for it, and it cost him about 
a hundred pounds to re-stock his shop with his 
own goods. 

As a general rule I key Solomons confined his 
purchases to small articles, mostly of jewellery 
and plate, which he kept concealed in a hiding- 
place with a trap-door just under his bed. He 
lived in Rosemary Lane, and sometimes had as 
much as ^20,000 worth of goods secreted on the 
premises. When his trade was busiest he set up 
a second establishment, at the head of which, al- 
though he was married, he put another lady, with 
whom he was on intimate terms. The second 
house was in Lower Queen Street, Islington, and 
he used it for some time as a depot for valuables. 
But it was eventually discovered by Mrs. Solo- 
mons, a very jealous wife, and this, with the 
danger arising from an extensive robbery of 
watches in Cheapside, in which Ikey was impli- 
cated as a receiver, led him to think seriously 
of trying his fortunes in another land. He was 
about to emigrate to New South Wales, when he 
was arrested at Islington and committed to New- 
243 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

gate on a charge of receiving stolen goods. 
While thus incarcerated he managed to escape 
from custody, but not actually from gaol, by an 
ingenious contrivance which is worth mention- 
ing. He claimed to be admitted to bail, and was 
taken from Newgate on a writ of habeas before 
one of the judges sitting at Westminster. He was ij 
conveyed in a coach driven by a confederate, and 
under the escort of a couple of turnkeys. Solo- 
mons, while waiting to appear in court, persuaded 
the turnkeys to take him to a public-house where I 
all might " refresh." While there he was joined 
by his wife and other friends. After a short ca- 
rouse the prisoner went into Westminster, his 
case was heard, bail refused, and he was ordered 
back to Newgate. But he once more persuaded 
the turnkeys to pause at the public-house, where 
more liquor was consumed. When the journey 
was resumed, Mrs. Solomons accompanied her 
husband in the coach. Half-way to Newgate she 
was taken with a fit. One turnkey was stupidly ► 
drunk, and I key persuaded the other, who was 
not much better, to let the coach change its route 
to the gaol, and pass Petticoat Lane, where the 
suffering woman might be handed over to her ^ 
friends. On stopping at a door in this low street, | 
Ikey jumped out and ran into the house, slam- 
ming the door behind him. He passed through 
and out at the back, and was soon beyond pur- 
suit. By-and-by the turnkeys, sobered by their 

244 



ll 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

loss, returned to Newgate alone, and pleaded in 
excuse that they had been drugged. 

I key left no traces, and the police could hear 
nothing of him. He had in fact gone out of the 
country, to Copenhagen, whence he passed on to 
New York. There he devoted himself to the cir- 
culation of forged notes. He was also anxious to 
do business in watches, and begged his wife to 
send him over a consignment of cheap "right- 
eous " watches, or such as had been honestly 
obtained, and not "on the cross." But Mrs. Solo- 
mons could not resist the temptation to dabble in 
stolen goods, and she was found shipping watches 
of the wrong category to New York. For this 
she received a sentence of fourteen years' trans- 
portation, and was sent to Van Diemen's Land. 
I key joined her at Hobart Town, where they set 
up a general shop, and soon began to prosper. 
He was, however, recognised, and ere long an 
order came out from home for his arrest and 
transfer to England, which presently followed, 
and he again found himself an inmate of New- 
gate, waiting trial as a receiver and a prison- 
breaker. He was indicted on eight charges, two 
only of which were substantiated, but on each 
of them he received a sentence of seven years' 
transportation. At his own request he was re- 
conveyed to Hobart Town, where his son had 
been carrying on the business. Whether I key 
was " assigned " to his own family is not re- 
245 



n 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

corded, but no doubt he succeeded to his own 
property when the term of servitude had ex- 
pired. 

Dickens began Oliver Twist in 1 838, at a time 
when the name of I key Solomons was no doubt 
as well-known as that of Charles Peace a genera- 
tion ago. The likeness between I key Solomons 
and Fagin is not too apparent perhaps ; but it 
happened that at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century there seems to have been a very plague 
of Jews engaged in receiving stolen property. 
There was another Solomons who was not above 
reproach, and an Abrahams, and Money Moses, 
a publican, who kept the Black Lion in Vinegar 
Yard, Drury Lane, where secretly he did busi- 
ness as one of the most daring and successful 
fences in London. Many of these fences are rum- 
oured to have trained children in crime, not in 
the preposterous way of Fagin that is presently 
to be described, but not less efficiently. To quote 
Major Griffiths again : 

A peculiar feature in the criminal records of the 
early part of the (nineteenth) century was the 
general increase in juvenile depravity. This was 
remarked and commented upon by all concerned 
in the administration of justice ; magistrates of 
all categories, police officers, gaolers, and philan- 
thropists. It was borne out, moreover, by the 

246 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

statistics of the times. There were in the various 
London prisons, in the year 1 8 1 6, three thousand 
inmates under twenty years of age. Nearly half 
of this number were under seventeen, and a thou- 
sand of these alone were convicted of felony. 
Many of those sent to prison were indeed of 
tender years. Some were barelynine or ten. Chil- 
dren began to steal when they could scarcely 
crawl. Cases were known of infants of barely six 
charged in the courts with crimes. This deplor- 
able depravity was attributable to various causes : 
to the profligacy prevailing in the parish schools; 
the cruel and culpable neglect of parents who de- 
serted their offspring, leaving them in a state of 
utter destitution, or were guilty of the no less dis- 
graceful wickedness of usingthem as instruments 
for their nefarious designs ; the artfulness of 
astute villains — prototypes of old Fagin — who 
trained the youthful idea in their own devious 
ways. The last-named was a fruitful source of 
juvenile crime. Children were long permitted to 
commit small thefts with impunity. The offence 
would have been death to those who used them 
as catspaws ; for them capital punishment was 
humanely nearly impossible. The education in 
iniquity continued steadily. They went from bad 
to worse, and ere long became regular inmates 
of " flash houses," where both sexes mixed freely 
with vicious companions of their own age, and 
the most daring enjoyed the hero-worship of their 
247 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

fellows. Whenthusassembled, they formed them- 
selves into distinct parties or gangs, each choos- 
ing one of their number as captain, and dividing 
themselves into reliefs to work certain districts, 
one by day and one by night. When they had 
"collared their swag," they returned to divide 
their plunder, having gained sometimes as much 
as three or four hundred pounds. A list of these 
horrible dens prepared about this date showed 
that there were two hundred of them, frequented 
by six thousand boys and girls, who lived solely 
by this way, or were the associates of thieves. 
These haunts were situated in St. Giles, Drury 
Lane, Chick Lane, Saffron Hill, the Borough, and 
Ratcliffe Highway. Others that were out of luck 
crowded the booths of Covent Garden, where all 
slept promiscuously amongst the rotting garbage 
of the stalls. During the daytime all were either 
actively engaged in thieving, or were revelling in 
low amusements. Gambling was a passion with 
them, indulged in without let or hindrance in the 
open streets; and from tossing buttons there they 
passed on to playing in the low public-houses at 
such games as " put," or " the rocks of Scylla," 
"bumble puppy," "tumble tumble," or "nine 
holes." 

These infamies, as a result of recent exposures, 
were matters of general knowledge at the time 
when Oliver Twist was written. What Dickens 

248 




HRYAN WALLER PROCTER 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

knew about them he knew in common with most 
other people. But he knew about them with a 
difference. He knew about them as the small boy 
knows about the black void behind the cellar- 
door. His elders call it the coal-hole. He knows 
that it is a cave of demons, the very porch of 
Hell. When his elders open that door only coals 
come out. But when he opens it — ^just an inch 
or two — and peeps in, he sees ghastly, lowering 
faces, grim and hideous, gibbering at him out of 
the darkness. He passes that door on tiptoe, and 
bears it in mind as he goes up to bed, and dreams 
about it in his sleep. So did Dickens dream of 
the mean squalor of the criminal haunts whose 
secrets were daily castup on the bare bleak shores 
of the police-office. So did he invest that squalor 
and its denizens with a quality of picturesque 
horror that lent them something of the hectic 
effect of leering, grinning devils in red torment. 
■ Fagin, the arch-devil, though he is limned in 
in the fewest possible words, stands forth lurid 
and malignant as the figure of Satan in mediaeval 
pageantry. He appears, like that typical mythi- 
cal Satan, with his toasting-fork, and the firelight 
playing over him. For the rest he is just " a very 
old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and 
repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of 
matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy 
flannel gown, with his throat bare." Dickens 
christens him " the old gentleman," " the pleas- 
249 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

ant old gentleman," " the merry old gentleman." 
Old Gentleman is still a euphemism for the devil 
in the more select lower-class circles. I 

When the breakfast was cleared away, the merry 
old gentleman and the two boys played at a very 
curious and uncommon game, which was per- 
formed in this way. The merry old gentleman, 
placing a snuff-box in one pocket of his trousers, 
a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waist- 
coat-pocket, with a guard-chain round his neck, 
and sticking a mock-diamond pin in his shirt : 
buttoned his coat tight round him, and putting 
hisspectacle-caseandhandkerchief in his pockets, 
trotted up and down the room with a stick, in 
imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen 
walk about the streets any hour in the day. 
Sometimes he stopped at the fire-place, and 
sometimes at the door, making believe that he 
was staring with all his might into shop- windows. 
At such times he would look constantly round 
him, for fear of thieves, and would keep slapping 
all his pockets in turn, to see that he hadn't lost 
anything, in suchaveryfunnyand natural manner 
that Oliver laughed till the tears ran down his 
face. All this time the two boys followed him 
closely about : getting out of his sight so nimbly 
everytime he turned round that it was impossible 
to follow their motions. At last the Dodger trod 
upon his toe, or ran upon his boot accidentally, 

250 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

while Charley Bates stumbled up against him be- 
hind ; and in that one moment they took from 
him, with the most extraordinary rapidity, snuff- 
box, note- case, watch-guard, chain, shirt-pin, 
pocket-handkerchief, even the spectacle-case. If 
the old gentleman felt a hand in any one of his 
pockets he cried out where it was ; and then the 
game began all over again. 

' Throughout the book, until the final catas- 
trophe, Fagin is usually presented as this kind of 
horribly amusing person; he is like some frowsy, 
obscene bird that seems to chuckle and mock in a 
secret language of its own. He shares with the 
rest of Dickens' really great villains that saving 
grace of humour, that grace which saves them 
from utter absurdity, utter unreality. The real 
Jew fence of Dickens' early days: I key Solomons 
or Money Moses : was probably a pale and 
colourless creature of a familiar atavistic type : 
dull-eyed, dull-witted, dull-spirited, slinking, 
sheepish, sly, and furtive. Fagin, alike in that 
first moment of his appearance on the lime-lit 
stage, beating the boys, his victims, about the 
shoulders with his toasting-fork, and in his last 
moments of epileptic frenzy in the condemned 
cell, is consistently theatrical and thrilling. He is 
always (as actors say) getting the last ounce out 
of his part. His final outcry is splendidly in keep- 
ing with his character, as he laughs aloud in his 
251 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

delirium of terror at the sad wistful ghost of 
Oliver, and exclaims : " Oliver, too, ha ! ha ! ha ! 
Oliver too — quite the gentleman now — quite the 
— take that boy away to bed ! . . . Take him 
away to bed ! " cried Fagin. " Do you hear me, 
some of you ? He has been the — the — somehow 
the cause of all this. It's worth the money to 
bring him up to it — Bolter's throat. Bill ; never 
mind the girl — Bolter's throat as deep as you can 
cut. Sawhisheadoff ! " " Fagin," said the jailer. 
" That's me I " cried the Jew, falling instantly 
into the attitude of listening he had assumed 
upon his trial. *' An old man, my lord ; a very 
old, old man ! " 

Old indeed I Old as the devil. As incredible 
as the devil. And as immortal ! / 



Dickens' books are full of violent criminals, 
several murderers among them ; but all of them 
accidental criminals, amateur rather than profes- 
sional criminals. Oliver Twist was his first and 
last excursus into that genre of the Underworld 
among the people of the abyss. In Nicholas 
Nickleby notably, but in each succeeding book 
ever less and less insistently, he clings to the old 
melodramatic conception of the villain as a per- 
son manifestly villainous in every aspect and nu- 
ance of his personality . . . until he is inspired 
to draw a murderer or two from life ; and then 

252 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

we get a Mademoiselle Hortense and a Julius 
SHnkton. 

Mademoiselle Hortense, lady's maid to Lady 
Dedlock, is described in Bleak Hottse as 

a Frenchwoman of two-and-thirty, from some- 
where in the southern country about Avignon 
and Marseilles — a large-eyed brown woman with 
black hair ; who would be handsome but for a 
certain feline mouth, and general uncomfortable 
tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager, 
and the skull too prominent. There is something 
indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy ; 
and she has a watchful way of looking out of the 
corners of her eyes without turning her head, 
which could be pleasantly dispensed with — espe- 
cially when she is in an ill-humour and near kni- 
ves. Through all the good taste of her dress and 
little adornments, these objections so express 
themselves that she seems to go about like a very 
neat She- wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being 
accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining 
to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in 
her acquaintance with the language. 

Mademoiselle Hortense was founded on the 
notorious Mrs. Manning, who, with her husband, 
suffered the penalty of death at Horsemonger 
Lane Gaol in 1849. 
253 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

The Mannings' victim was 

'a man named Patrick O'Connor, a Custom- 
House gauger, who had been a suitor of Marie 
de Roux before she became Mrs. Manning. 
Marie de Roux up to the time of her marriage 
had been in service as lady's maid to Lady Blan- 
tyre, daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, and 
Manning hoped to get some small Government 
appointment through his wife's interest. He had 
failed in this as well as in the business of a publi- 
can which he had at one time adopted. After the 
marriage a close intimacy was still maintained 
between O'Connor and the Mannings. He lived 
at Mile End, whence he walked often to call at 
3 Miniver Place, Bermondsey, the residence of 
his old love. O'Connor was a man of substance. 
He had long followed the profitable trade of a 
money-lender, and by dint of usurious interest 
on small sums advanced to needy neighbours, 
had amassed as much as ;^8ooo or £ 1 0,000. H is 
wealth was well-known to " Maria," as he called 
Mrs. Manning, who made several ineffectual 
attempts to get money out of him. At last this 
fiendish woman made up her mind to murder 
O'Connor and appropriate all his possessions. 
Her husband, to whom she coolly confided her 
intentions, a heavy brutish fellow, was yet aghast 
at his wife's resolve, and tried hard to dissuade 

' Chronicles of Newgate.^ by Major Arthur Griffiths. 

254 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

her from her bad purpose. In his confession after 
sentence he declared that she plied him well with 
brandy at this period, and that during all the time 
he was never in his right senses. Meanwhile the 
woman, unflinching in her cold, bloody determi- 
nation, carefully laid all her plans for the consum- 
mation of the deed. 

One fine afternoon in August, O'Connor was 
met walking in the direction of Bermondsey. He 
was dressed with particular care, as he was to 
dine at the Mannings' and meet friends, one a 
young lady. He was seen afterwards smoking 
and talking with his hosts in their back-parlour 
and never seen again alive. It came out in the 
husband's confession that Mrs. Manning induced 
O'Connor to go down to the kitchen to wash his 
hands, that she followed him to the basement, 
that she stood behind him as he stood near the 
open grave she herself had dug for him, and 
which he mistook for a drain, and that while he 
was speaking to her she put the muzzle of a pistol 
close to the back of his head and shot him down. 
She ran upstairs, told her husband, made him go 
down to look at her handiwork, and as O'Connor 
was not quite dead. Manning gave the coup de 
grace with a crowbar. After this Mrs. Manning 
changed her dress and went off in a cab to O'Con- 
nor's lodgings, which, having possessed herself 
of the murdered man's keys, she rifled from end 
to end. Returning to her own home, where Man- 
255 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

ning meanwhile had been calmly smoking and 
talking to the neighbours over the basement wall, 
the corpse lying just inside the kitchen all the 
while, the two set to work to strip the body and 
hide it under the stones of the floor. This job was 
not completed till the following day, as the hole 
had to be enlarged, and the only tool they had 
was a dust-shovel. A quantity of quicklime was 
thrown in with the body to destroy all identifica- 
tion. This was on a Thursday evening. For the 
remainder of that week and part of the next the 
murderers stayed in the house and occupied the 
kitchen close to the remains of their victim. On 
the Sunday Mrs. Manning roasted a goose at this 
same kitchen fire and ate it with relish in the 
afternoon. This cold-blooded indifference after 
the event was only outdone by the premeditation 
of this horrible murder. The holemust have been 
excavated and the quicklime purchased quite 
three weeks before O'Connor met his death, and 
during that time he must frequently have stood 
or sat over his own grave. 

The murder was discovered. Mr. and Mrs. 
Manning were arrested. 

The prisoners were in due course transferred to 
Newgate to be put upon their trial at the Central 
Criminal Court. Agreat number of distinguished 
people assembled as usual at the Old Bailey on 
the day of the trial. The Mannings were ar- 

256 




LORD GRENVILLE 

Barnaby Rudge 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

raigned together : the husband standing at one 
of the front corners of the dock, his wife at the 
other end. . . . Mrs. Manning was not without 
personal charms : her face was comely, she had 
dark hair and good eyes, and was above the 
middle height, yet inclined to be stout. She was 
smartly dressed in a plaid shawl and a white lace 
cap ; her hair was dressed in long bands. She 
had lace ruffles at her wrists, and wore primrose- 
coloured kid gloves. The case rested upon irre- 
futable evidence, and was proved to the satisfac- 
tion of the jury who brought in a verdict of guilty 
. . . when sentence of death was passed . . . 
Mrs. Manning, speaking with a foreign accent, 
addressed the court with great fluency and vehe- 
mence. She complained that she had had no jus- 
tice ; there was no law for her ; she had found no 
protection either from judges, the prosecutor, or 
her husband. She had not been treated like a 
Christian but like a wild beast of the forest. . . . 
When the judge assumed the black cap Mrs. 
Manning became still more violent, shouting, 
" No, no, I will not stand it ! You ought to be 
ashamed of yourselves ! " and would have left the 
dock had not Mr. Cope, thegovernor of Newgate, 
restrained her. After judgment was passed she 
repeatedly cried out Shame ! and stretching out 
her hand she gathered up a quantity of the rue 
which, following ancient custom, dating from the 
days of the gaol fever, was strewn in front of the 
257 R 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

dock, and threw it towards the bench with a con- 
temptuous gesture. 

On being removed to Newgate from the Court 
Mrs. Manning became perfectly furious. She 
uttered loud imprecations, cursing judge, jury, 
barristers, witnesses, and all who stood around. 
Her favourite and most often-repeated expres- 
sion was, " D — n seize you all." They had to 
handcuff her by force against the most violent re- 
sistance, and still she raged and stormed, shaking 
her clenched and manacled hands in the officers' 
faces. From Newgate the Mannings were taken 
in separate cabs to Horsemonger Lane Gaol. 
On this journey her manner changed completely. 
She became flippant, joked with the officers, 
asked how they liked her *' resolution " in the 
dock, and expressed her utmost contempt for her 
husband, whom she never intended to acknow- 
ledge or speak to again. Later her mood changed 
to abject despair. On reaching the condemned 
cell she threw herself upon the floor and shrieked 
in an hysterical agony of tears. After this until 
the day of execution she recovered her spirits 
and displayed reckless effrontery, mocking at the 
chaplain, and turning a deaf ear to the counsels 
of a benevolent lady who visited her. Now she 
abused the jury, now called Manning a vaga- 
bond, and through all ate heartily at every meal, 
slept soundly at nights, and talked with cheerful- 
ness on almost any subject. Nevertheless she 

258 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

attempted to commit suicide by driving her nails, 
purposely kept long, into her throat. She was 
discovered just as she was getting black in the 
face. 

Charles Dickens, who witnessed the execution 
of the Mannings, wrote to The Times saying that 
he believed that "a sight so inconceivably awful 
as the wickedness and levity of the immense 
crowd collected at the execution this morning 
could be imagined by no man, and presented by 
no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of 
the gibbet, and the crime which brought the 
wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind be- 
fore the atrocious bearing, looks and language of 
the assembled spectators. When I came upon 
the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries 
and howls that were raised from time to time, de- 
noting that they came from a concourse of boys 
and girls already assembled in the best places, 
made my blood run cold." 

As a result of this passionate protest public 
executions were abandoned in England. 

The prototype of Julius Slinkton in Dickens' 
short story Hunted Down was Thomas Griffiths 
Wainewright, essayist, forger, and poisoner, who 
was born at Chiswick in October, 1794. Left an 
orphan he was brought up at Turnham Green by 
his grandfather. Doctor Ralph Griffiths, the 
259 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

founder of The Monthly Review^ and was edu- 
cated under Charles Burney. He held a commis- 
sion in the Guards when, about 1820 or earlier, 
he took to writing tawdry art criticisms and mis- 
cellaneous articles for the periodicals, especially 
the London Magazine, under the pseudonym of 
Janus Weathercock. He married on ;^200 a 
year, and soon outrunning his means first com- 
mitted a forgery, and then poisoned with strych- 
nine his uncle, his mother-in-law, his sister-in- 
law, and a Norfolk acquaintance at Boulogne. 
The sister-in-law (Wainewright's wife was an ac- 
complice in her murder) had been fraudulently 
insured for ;^ 18,000, but two actions to enforce 
payment failed ; and Wainewright, venturing 
backfrom France to London in 1 837, was arrested 
for his old forgery, and sentenced to life trans- 
portation. Even in Newgate he bragged of still 
holding " the position of a gentleman," and in 
Van Diemen's Land canted about Art and the 
Ideal. There he painted portraits, ate opium, and 
at last died of apoplexy at HobartTownin 1852. 
During his early manhood he exhibited fre- 
quently at the Royal Academy, and also pub- 
lished one book entitled Some Passages in the 
Life of Egomet Bonmot, besides acting as editor 
of the London Magazine for a time. 

Indeed Wainewright did cut something of a 
figure among the notabilities of his brief day ; 
and does seem to have strangely interested, fav- 

260 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

ourably or otherwise, many of his contemporaries. 
Hazlitt, Lamb, Bryan Waller Procter (** Barry 
Cornwall"), Lytton, and Dickens all wrote about 
him. Lytton made him the central figure of his 
forgotten novel, Lucretia, wherein, as Gabriel 
Varney, he is more orless faithfully mirrored from 
his childhood up. Lamb seems to have had a real 
affection for him, refers to him as the kindly, 
light-hearted Janus, and mentions him as having 
wept at the false news of Elia's death. But Procter 
describes him scathingly as " short and fattish, 
with mincing steps and tremulous words, his hair 
curled and full of unguents, and his cheeks painted 
like those of a demirep." And there are passing 
allusions to this horrible creature in Forster's 
Life which tend to support Procter's view of his 
character. 

Forster and Dickens, in 1838 or 1839, made 
a circuit of nearly all the London prisons ; " and 
in coming to the prisoners under remand, while 
going over Newgate, accompanied by Macready 
(the actor) and Mr. Hablot Browne ('Phiz'), 
were startled by a sudden tragic cry of * My God, 
there's Wainewright ! ' In the shabby-genteel 
creature, with sandy, disordered hair and dirty 
moustache, who had turned quickly round with 
a defiant stare at our entrance, looking at once 
mean andfierce,andquite capable of the cowardly 
murders he had committed, Macready had been 
horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to 
261 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

him in former years, and at whose table he had 
dined." 

We find Dickens' ultimate use of this poor 
tawdry villain foreshadowed in the following note 
from his manuscript book : " Devoted to the De- 
struction of a man. Revenge built up on love. 
The secretary in the Wainewright case, who had 
fallen in love (or supposed he had) with the mur- 
dered girl. . . . The man with his hair parted 
straight up the front of his head, like an aggra- 
vating gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. 
' Up here, if you please. Neither to the right or 
left. Take me exactly in this direction. Straight 
up here. Come off the grass.' " 

In Hunted Down this same character is pre- 
sented as a man of " about forty or so, dark, ex- 
ceedingly well dressed in black — being in mourn- 
ing — and the hand he extended with a polite 
air had a particularly well-fitting black kid glove 
upon it. His hair, which was elaborately brushed 
and oiled, was parted straight up the middle; and 
he presented this parting to the clerk, exactly (to 
my thinking) as if he said in so many words : 
'You must take me, if you please, my friend, just 
as I show myself. Come straight up here, follow 
the gravel path, keep off the grass, I allow no 
trespassing.' " 

Hunted Down does not matter much, in a liter- 
ary sense. It is, I think, the only real pot-boiler 
Dickens ever wrote, a very poor story, utterly 

262 



THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 

unworthy of its author ; but I cite it in this con- 
nection as an apt illustration of the difference be- 
tween Dickens' earliest and latest methods of 
dealing with criminal types. Julius Slinkton is so 
very much more probable than Fagin or Quilp 
or Jonas Chuzzlewit — and so infinitely less con- 
vincing. 




SAMUEL CARTER HALL 
"Pecksniff" 



CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 



CHAPTER THE 

ELEVENTH GREAT GROTESQUES 

IT SEEMS A PITY THAT MOST OF 

Dickens' characters should have had no recog- 
nisable prototypes in real life ; or, if they had 
prototypes, that so little should be known about 
them, and that that little should be so vague and 
unsatisfactory. It seems all the more a pity be- 
cause there is often plentiful information about 
many of his minor characters ; and the sum of 
that information is increasing almost daily. In 
every issue of The Dickensian, and in every new 
review of Dickens' life and work, there is gener- 
ally to be found an item or so dealing with the 
newly-discovered prototypes of this or that figure 
from one or other of his novels, or touching on 
some fresh fact concerning the old accepted pro- 
totypes. 

Thus it is that writing a book about Dickens 
is like writing an encyclopaedia. As soon as you 
think that you have definitely and finally settled 
some matter relating to him some new develop- 
ment of that matter crops up, and you find that 
you are out of date almost before the ink has dried 
on the paper. Dickens, like Shakespeare, is in- 
exhaustible. The more you write or think about 
him the more there is to think and write about. 
Which is merely to say, perhaps, that he is like 
life itself. 

And just herethe NewCriticismgets its hackles 
267 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

up. "Likelife!"saysthe New Criticism. "There 
is nothing so unlike life as Dickens. His people 
are preposterous. His incidents are incredible. 
His pathos is a thing of gulps and snuffles like 
a cold in the head. And his humour ... his 
humour is no laughing matter." 

But I have taken New Critics to see the late 
Dan Leno. And they have laughed at him con- 
sumedly. They did not know that Dan Leno was 
just a character — not always the same character 
— out of Dickens. He was a preposterous per- 
son, if you like. The incidents he described were 
usually incredible. H is voice was one of the most 
pathetic voices I have ever heard : hoarse and 
plaintive ; and his humour was so far from being 
a laughing matter (to him) that he gave it forth 
in a series of moans and sobs. I have seen Mr. 
Bransby Williams in his impersonations of Dick- 
ens characters, and though I respect and admire 
his sincere conscientiousness and his obviously 
deep feeling for Dickens I have never seen any- 
thing less like any character out of Dickens than 
Mr. Williams' interpretation of Dickens charac- 
ters. I have seen Miss Lee as Poor Jo, and Mr. 
Charles Wilmot as Chadband. I have seen Sir 
Herbert Tree and his company in Oliver Twist ; 
1 have seen Mr. Martin Harvey as Sydney Car- 
ton in The Only Way^ and Mr. Cyril Maude as 
Sairey Gamp. And they have all been hope- 

268 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

lessly out of the picture. But Mr. Dan Leno . . . 
I feel, somehow, that if Dickens had only lived 
long enough he would have been bound in the in- 
evitable nature of things to create "Mrs. Kelly," 
and The Proprietor of The Nineteenth Century 
Stores, and The Shopwalker, and the Leader of 
The Midnight March. For these preposterous 
people that Dan Leno put upon the stage in his 
own person, and the incredible tales that he told 
about them ; these people with their sad humour 
and their humorous pathos: these were in the very 
vein of Dickens. And one had only to glance 
round the house at the audience, to see their 
laughing faces and to hear the thunder of their 
mirth, to discover the secret of Dickens', popu- 
larity. 

The fact is that when any man says of litera- 
ture or art that it presents a false picture of life 
he is talking like a fool, not a nice silly fool, but 
a conceited fool. He is arrogating to himself all 
wisdom and all knowledge. He is claiming to 
have plumbed and scaled all the depths and 
heights of human nature. And obviously he has 
to be very young or very ignorant, or both, to ad- 
vance such a gigantic claim. Older, wiser folk 
know that, in a manner of speaking, there are as 
many different worlds as there are people in the 
world. Things exist, not in themselves, but in the 
eyes of the beholder. To all true women all 
269 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

babies are beautiful, and to everybody else they 
are ugly. The tragedy of the young man in the 
new pair of trousers who is going to meet his 
sweetheart, and who slips upon a piece of orange- 
peel and sits down in a puddle, is the onlookers' 
comedy. One man's humour is another man's 
boredom, and a third man's exasperation. We 
cannot all laugh at the same thing ; we must 
laugh at one another, or, better still, at ourselves. 
Dickens taught us to laugh at the whole human 
race, villains and ourselves included ; and those 
of us who don't — who can't or won't — laugh with 
us, must expect to have the laughter turned 
against them. There is nothing that so infuri- 
ates the average man as the dolt who cannot see 
his jokes. And the average man is quite right. 
He who never sees a joke never sees anything ; 
and he who never sees anything denies that any- 
thing is there. 

Dickens in himself provides the finest answer 
to the critics who say that what does not seem 
true to them must of necessity be false. Dickens 
was a supreme type of the average man. He was 
the average man grown to the proportions of a 
giant. There never was any individual average 
man in the least like Dickens ; and yet Dickens 
expresses all average men. And in the same way 
— and this is the point I would make — he ex- 
presses all sorts of average people by investing 
them with his own proportions, by drawing them 

270 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

to his own scale, and so sublimating them that 
they become supreme types also. 

The original of Mrs. Gamp was in reality a 
person hired by a most distinguished friend of 
Dickens, a lady, to take charge of an invalid very 
dear to her ; and the common habit of this nurse 
in the sick-room, among other Gampish peculi- 
arities, was to rub her nose along the top of the 
tall fender. From that trick of rubbing her nose 
along the top of the fender Dickens built up one 
of his most colossal figures. 

" Mrs. Gamp (says Dickens in his Preface to 
Martin Chuzzlewit) was, four-and-twenty years 
ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant 
on the poor in sickness. The Hospitals of London 
were, in many respects, noble Institutions ; in 
others, very defective. 1 think it not the least 
among the instances of their mismanagement 
that Mrs. Betsy Prig was a fair specimen of a 
Hospital Nurse." 

That is Dickens in judicial mood, when his 
transports have died down, and the morning has 
turned a cold eye upon the visions of the night. 
But Dickens in that mood is seldom convincing. 
Hitherto we have had no doubts whatever as to 
the reality of Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig ; but 
now we have an uneasy conviction that we should 
not find a Sairey Gamp at any lying-in or laying- 
out, or a Betsy Prig in any of the hospitals, 
though we searched London through. If we made 
271 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

that search, however, I think, at the end of it, 
we should bring home with us an impression of I 
dozens of different hospital nurses that formed a 
sort of composite portrait of Betsy Prig ; and we i 
should bring home with us impressions of dozens f 
of private nurses that, in bulk and being subtly 
blent together, were somehow quite adequately 
expressed in the personality of Mrs. Gamp. 

The chief fault of the modern realist is that 
he whittles away all eccentricities to get at the 
normal type, instead of adding eccentricity to 
eccentricity. He forgets that it is by a man's 
eccentricities that we remember him and recog- 
nise him again; and that as the vast majority of 
men have some eccentricity or other, that man 
cannot possibly be normal who has none. We 
believe in Dickens' great grotesques because 
they are so compact of eccentricities which re- 
mind us of the eccentricities of our friends and 
acquaintances. There were, in Dickens' day, fat 
nurses, nurses with pimply faces, nurses with red 
and swollen noses, nurses who smelt of spirits, 
nurses who carried pattens, who carried a species 
of gig umbrella, who had a husky voice, who had 
a moist eye, who had a remarkable power of turn- 
ing up that eye and showing only the white of 
it, nurses with the strange idioms and turns of 
speech that Mrs. Gamp affected. And though it 
is extremely unlikely that you would have found 
any one nurse with all these peculiarities, it is 

272 



I 




SIR ROBERT PEEL 
A possible original of "Pecksniff' 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

extremely likely that among them you would have 
found them all. 

In this way — in the way, I mean, by which he 
achieved his effects — Dickens was a better real- 
ist than Zola. In France I have met many men 
and women who reminded me irresistibly at first 
sight of people in Zola's books ; but very soon 
I found that they all possessed some distinctive 
quality or idiosyncrasy that made them quite dif- 
ferent. Of course ; for there are no two of us 
alike. The majority of Thomas Hardy's peas- 
ants might conceivably change minds with one 
another, and no one, not even themselves, be 
any the wiser ; but the peasants of Dorsetshire 
could not change minds with one another without 
going mad. You could not say this of the char- 
acters of Meredith, who was a contemporary and 
a disciple of Dickens. Sir Willoughby Patterne 
would be laughed out of Society; yet I find it 
easier to believe in him than in all Mr. John 
Galsworthy's Men of Property who somehow re- 
fuse to sort themselves out in my mind, who lurk 
in the background of my memory like shadows, 
like the rows of people I never get a chance to 
talk to in a crowded drawing-room, and whose 
salient features are as hard for me to remember 
as their names, which I have never heard. 

Side by sidewith Mrs. Gamp, in the book called 
Martin Ckuzzlewit, there is the hardly less strik- 
273 s 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS I 

ing figure of Pecksniff. By some (Forster among 
them) Pecksniff is said to have been founded on 
Sir Robert Peel ; by others, on Samuel Carter 
Hall, who is best remembered as the husband of ■ 
Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. Mr. Hall, author and I 
editor, was the fourth son of Colonel Robert 
Hall. He was born at Geneva Barracks, County 
Waterford, 9th May 1800. Coming to London 
from Ireland in 1822, he studied law, and became 
a gallery reporter for the New Times. He esta- 
blished The Amulet in 1825, an annual which 
he edited for several years ; succeeded the poet 
Campbell as editor of the New Monthly Maga- 
zine; was sub-editor of the John Bull; and did 
other journalistic work before he founded and 
edited the Art Journal m 1839, which has done 
so much to create a public for art. He was a per- 
tinacious and indefatigable worker and skilful 
compiler, the joint works written and edited by 
Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall exceeding five hundred 
volumes. A testimonial of £ 1 600 was presented 
to him by friends in 1874, and in 1880 he re- 
ceived a civil list pension of ;^ 150 a year. He 
died 1 6th March 1889. He went to lecture in the 
United States at one period of his life, and was 
invidiously heralded by some American papers 
as "the original of Pecksniff." "Having heard 
the novelist speak of this writer (says Mr. Fitz 
gerald) I might be inclined to think the theory is 
not so far-fetched." 

274 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

As to Sir Robert Peel we only know that 
Dickens' description of Pecksniff, though bear- 
ing some resemblance to the outward appear- 
ance of the statesman, is not much like any de- 
scription of him that his contemporaries have 
preserved. Pecksniff was 

a most exemplary man : fuller of virtuous pre- 
cepts than a copy-book. Some people likened 
him to a direction-post, which is always telling 
the way to a place and never goes there : these 
were his enemies; the shadows cast by his bright- 
ness; that was all. His very throat was moral. 
You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a 
very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man 
had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind) 
and there it lay, a valley between two jutting 
heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before 
you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Peck- 
sniff, "There is no deception, ladies and gentle- 
men, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me." So 
did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-grey, which 
was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt 
upright, or slightly drooped in kindred with his 
heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was 
sleek though free from corpulency. So did his 
manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even 
his plain black suit, and state of widower, and 
dangling double eyeglass, all tended to the same 
purpose, and cried aloud, "Behold the moral 
Pecksniff!" 
275 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

But 

Sir Robert Peel (says Mr. Justin M'Carthy in 
A History of Our Own Times), the leader of the 
opposition (in 1837), was by far the most power- 
ful man in the House of Commons. Added to his 
great qualities as an administrator and a Parlia- 
mentary debater, he had the virtue, then very 
rare among Conservatives, of being a sound and 
clear financier, with a good grasp of the funda- 
mental principles of political economy. His high 
austere character made him respected by oppo- 
nents as well as by friends. His temperament 
was cold, or at least its heat was self-contained ; 
he threw out no genial glow to those around him. 
He was by nature a reserved and shy man, in 
whose manners shyness took the form of pomp- 
ousness and coldness. Something might be said 
of him like that which Richter said of Schiller : 
he was to strangers stony and like a precipice 
from which it was their instinct to spring back. 
It is certain that he had warm and generous feel- 
ings, but his very sensitiveness only led him to 
disguise them. The contrast between his emo- 
tions and his lack of demonstrativeness created 
in him a constant artificiality which often seemed 
mere awkwardness. 

No ; the more closely we compare Sir Robert 
Peel with Pecksniff the more fantastic seems the 
theory that there was any but a superficial resem- 
blance between them. 

276 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

The notion of taking Pecksniff for a type of char- 
acter (says Forster, writing of Martin Ckuzzle- 
wit) was really the origin of the book ; the design 
being to show, more or less by every person in- 
troduced, the number and variety of humours and 
vices that have their root in selfishness. 

And never was any purpose more supremely 
consummated. The Americans need not have 
been so indignant against Dickens for what they 
stigmatised as his gross libels upon them and 
their country. 

They had no Pecksniff, at any rate. Bred in a 
more poisonous swamp than their Eden, of greatly 
older standing and much harder to be drained, 
Pecksniff was all our own. The confession is not 
encouraging to national pride, but this character 
is so far English that though our countrymen as a 
rule are by no means Pecksniffs, the ruling weak- 
ness is to countenance and encourage the race. 
When people call the character exaggerated, and 
protest that the lines are too broad to deceive 
anyone, they only refuse, naturally enough, to 
sanction in abook what half their lives is passed in 
tolerating, if not worshipping. Dickens, illustrat- 
ing his never-failing experience of being obliged 
to subdue in his books what he knew to be real for 
fear it should be deemed impossible, had already 
made the remark in his Preface to Nickleby that 
277 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

the world, which is so very credulous in what pro- 
fesses to be true, is most incredulous in what pro- 
fesses to be imaginary. Theyagree to be deceived 
in a reality, and reward themselves by refusing to 
be deceived in a fiction. That a great many people 
who might have sat for Pecksniff should condemn 
him for a grotesque impossibility, as Dickens av- 
erred to be the case, was no more than might be 
expected. A greater danger he has exposed more 
usefully in showing the larger numbers who, de- 
siring to be thought better than they are, support 
eagerly pretensions that keep their own in coun- 
tenance, and without being Pecksniffs, render 
Pecksniffs possible. All impostures would have 
something suspicious or too forbidding in their 
look if we were not prepared to meet them half- 
way. 

And Pecksniffianism is still at the head of af- 
fairs in many of our national institutions. The 
intolerable cant of godliness that emanates from 
our blood-sucking millionaires ; the pious horror 
of our sleek prelates confronted with elemental 
facts of human nature ; the lip-service that is 
paid by our aristocracy to our plutocracy ; the 
tender solicitude of the sweater, the usurer, and 
the slum-owner for the poor and helpless, which 
goes with uplifted hands and a roll of white eye- 
balls ; the pestiferous hypocrisy of vote-catching 
politicians ; the smug self-complacency of well- 
paid charity-mongers : all these are unmistak- 

278 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

able manifestations of the true Pecksniffian spirit 
that is as rife to-day as in Dickens' day. 

Pecksniff, of course, like all the other great 
grotesques, was merely another of the monsters 
that Dickens created out of the sheer exuber- 
ance of his immortal childhood. To the eyes of 
children all things are exaggerated ; and being 
exaggerated are more easily and clearly observed 
in detail. To say that there never was such a man 
as Pecksniff is no doubt true enough ; yet it is 
equally true to say that there are thousands of 
men like him. To say that there never was a man 
so vile as Carker, or a man so innocent as Bofifin, 
is merely to say that you have forgotten your 
own childhood, when everyone was good or bad, 
kind or unkind, beautiful or ugly — to you. There 
is something Olympian, god-like, in the judg- 
ments of childhood. Except ye become as little 
children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
Heaven. Dickens entered into his kingdom be- 
cause he remained a child. 

It was as a child of tender years that he saw 
Mrs. Roy lance whom he afterwards turned into 
Mrs. Pipchin. It was as a child that he saw Mary 
Weller, who became the Peggotty oi David Cop- 
perfield. But it was also with the eyes of a child, 
though he had long since attained to manhood, 
that he watched the goings-on of a certain un- 
pleasant and rather mysterious individual with 
279 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

largeprominent teeth, who wasconnected through 
his father with an eminent engineering firm, and 
who lived in the Oxford Road, and haunted that 
neighbourhood o' nights, prowling about and og- 
ling and frightening all the servant girls. This 
man, probably a harmless neurotic maniac, was 
a notorious character : notorious in Leamington 
as well as in London ; but nobody seems to have 
interfered with him — except Dickens. Dickens 
interfered with him to the extent of christening 
him " Carker," and following him to Leamington, ^j 
and pestering him with gipsies, and playing the ' ' 
very devil with him generally. To Dickens this 
poor wretch was not a plain case for the hospi- 
tal or the mad-house ; he was a highly-coloured 
death's-head and skeleton masquerading as a man 
and behaving like a fiend. 

So with Boffin and Weggand Mr. Venus. Bof- 
fin was founded on a Mr. Dodd, a dust contrac- 
tor. A Mr. Braye,of the Kensington Vestry, who 
knew him well, says of him : 

As to the healthiness of the calling, I have the 
authority of a gentleman descended from a long 
line of dust contractors, and a near relation of Mr. 
Boffin, immortalised by Dickens in Our Mutual 
Friend3.s "The Golden Dustman." This gentle- 
man, who is still slightly connected with the dust 
business, I will call Boffin junior ; he was well 
acquainted with the great novelist, made a for- 

280 




MRS HAYES 



■ I^Ollv I i;i.d 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

tune in the family business, devotes his time, and, 
I should think, a considerable sum of money, to 
the study of natural history — (his place is a sort 
of zoological and botanic garden combined) ; — 
and he is as conversant with Darwin and the 
great men of science as he is with the best means 
of making money out of dust-bin refuse. So, such 
is the force of habit, that he has set aside a cor- 
ner of his park for the neighbouring townsfolk 
to shoot their dust. He says he likes the smell ; 
it reminds him of old times. The story told by 
Dickens is substantially correct. Mr. Boffin had 
one daughter ; she was sought in marriage by 
a gentleman of aristocratic connections. On the 
wedding morn the Golden Dustman, instead of 
coming down with a big cheque, to the dismay 
of the gentleman, said the only present he could 
make the bride would be one of his dust-heaps. 
The bridegroom accepted, as he thought, a bad 
bargain ; but he sold it to the brickmakers for 
i^ 1 0,000. 

Mr. Boffin lived in a corner house not far from 
Cavendish Square, which was likely enough in 
one of those long genteel streets — Wimpole 
Street or Harley Street — which were Dickens' 
pet aversion. Here the famous Silas Wegg had 
his post. Denizens of the Pimlico district, who 
dwell " not a hundred miles from Eccleston 
Square," know well a sort of replica of this per- 
sonage, one-legged also, who strangely, and of 
281 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

course unconsciously, reproduced many traits of 
the original. He is a perfect character — has his 
privileges, his chair, in defiance of street regula- 
tions, knows everyone in the street, and I dare- 
say talks of "our house." Like his predecessor, 
he at one time had literary tastes, and I recall his 
showing me verses of a pious cast which he pro- 
fessed to be of his own "engendure." . . . 

The original of Mr. Venus was a Mr. J. Willis, 
of 42 Saint Andrew's Street, Seven Dials, whom 
Mr. Fitzgerald '(to whose admirable book Boz- 
land I am indebted for the foregoing particulars) 
discovered on his own account. He said to Dick- 
ens: "I am convinced I have found the original 
of Venus," and proceeded to describe Willis. 
" You are right," said Dickens. 

Mr. Venus's extraordinary establishment (Mr. 
Fitzgerald goes on to say) where he pursued his 
articulation of skeletons, &c., was fixed in Clerk- 
enwell — where were the ** poorer shops of small 
retail traders in commodities to eat and drink and 
keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, 
and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in 
dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow 
and dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr. 
Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tal- 
low candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a 
muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of 

282 



THE GREAT GROTESQUES 

leather and dry stick, but among which nothing 
is resolvable into anything distinct, save the 
candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two 
preserved frogs, fighting a small-sword duel." 

I seize eagerly upon these last details of that 
extraordinary establishment in Clerkenwell, be- 
cause I believe I have seen it. But (Mr. Fitz- 
gerald notwithstanding) I did not see it in Clerk- 
enwell. I saw it, as a tiny boy, in Great Portland 
Street, near the old Orthopaedic Hospital. I used 
to gaze into that window with the eyes of Dick- 
ens, for I was then the only kind of child I have 
ever been — and that for only a few years ; but 
Dickens was the same kind of child all his life. 
He could go, at fifty-five years old, and see just 
exactly what I saw at five years old. At five years 
old I saw infinities of mystery and horror and 
dark romance in that window ; now I should look 
into it and see nothing. I should say : " It is so 
badly lighted I can see nothing in it." At five it 
was so badly lighted that I could see everything 
in it. And so, at fifty-five, could Dickens. His 
all-seeing eye was not so much an eye as a star, 
a star that contained a whole world. His eyes 
were the eyes of childhood, the clear bright eyes 
of childhood that reflect the pure blue of a spring 
sky, that reflect the floor of that kingdom of 
Heaven into which we cannot enter except we 
become as little children. 



CHAPTER THE TWELFTH 
MINOR CHARACTERS 



I 



CHAPTER THE 

TWELFTH MINOR CHARACTERS 

THERE ARE VERY FEW MINOR 
characters in Dickens. Many of his people whom 
we only speak in passing we seem to know better 
than we know the man next door, with whom we 
have chatted over our garden-fence for seven 
years past. There is, for example, Master Hum- 
phrey, who also appears in The Old Curiosity 
Shop as the Single Gentleman. Speaking for 
himself Master Humphrey says : 

I am not a churlish old man. Friendless I can 
never be, for all mankind are my kindred, and I 
am on ill terms with no one member of my great 
family. But for many years I have led a lonely, 
solitary life; — what wound I sought to heal, what 
sorrow to forget, originally, matters not now ; it 
is sufficient that retirement has become a habit 
with me, and that I am unwilling to break the 
spell which for so long a time has shed its quiet 
influence upon my home and heart. 

I live in a venerable suburb of London, in an 
old house which in bygone days was a famous re- 
sort for merry roysterers and peerless ladies, long 
since departed. It is a silent, shady place, with a 
paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes 
I am tempted to believe that faint responses to 
the noises of old times linger there yet, and that 
these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I 
287 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

pace it up and down. . . .Those who like to read 
of brilliant rooms and gorgeous furniture would 
derive but little pleasure from a minute descrip- 
tion of my little dwelling. It is dear to me for the 
same reason that they would hold it in slight 
regard. Its worm-eaten doors, and low ceilings i 
crossed by clumsy beams ; its walls of wainscot, 
dark stairs, and gaping closets ; its small cham- 
bers communicating with each other by winding 
passages or narrow steps ; its many nooks, scarce i 
larger than its corner-cupboards ; its very dust I 
and dulness are all dear to me. The moth and f 
spider are my constant tenants ; for in my house 
the one basks in his long sleep, and the other 
plies his busy loom secure and undisturbed. I 
have a pleasure in thinking on a summer's day 
how many butterflies have sprung for the first 
time into light and sunshine from some dark 
corner of these old walls. 

When I first came to live here, which was 
many years ago, the neighbours were curious to 
know who I was, and whence I came, and why I 
lived so much alone. As time went on and they 
still remained unsatisfied on these points I be- 
came the centre of a popular ferment, extending 
for half a mile round, and in one direction for a 
full mile. Various rumours were circulated to my 
prejudice. I was a spy, an infidel, a conjurer, a 
kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a mon- 
ster. . . . But when in course of time they found 

288 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

I did no harm, but on the contrary inclined to- 
wards them despite their unjust usage, they began 
to relent. . . . And now I never walk abroad but 
pleasant recognitions and smiling faces wait on 
Master Humphrey. 

Dickens got his first hint for the character of 
Master Humphrey from seeing the name and 
description " Humphreys, clockmaker," over a 
shop-window in Barnard Castle, on his visit to 
that town in search of information about the 
Yorkshire schools. It was in that way that Dick- 
ens got many of his best inspirations ; though 
Master Humphrey can hardly be reckoned am- 
ong his best, perhaps. And yet . . . there is in 
Master Humphrey's ^^^^/"introduction of himself 
something richly suggestive. " I have a pleasure 
in thinking on a summer's day how many butter- 
flies have sprung for the first time into light and 
sunshine from some dark corner of these old 
walls," says he. How many indeed that Dickens 
started, that took wing, with him in hot boyish 
pursuit, and at last soared into the empyrean and 
were lost to view, leaving him gazing upward un- 
til his eyes were tired, and then gazing around 
him at the fairyland into which his pursuit had 
led him. All his butterflies lured him into fairy- 
land, as butterflies do lead boys over hedges and 
through ditches, in and out of the copse, by the 
side of twinkling, tinkling streams, across the 
289 T 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

meadows, into a new strange territory that they 
sit down contentedly to play in, and straightway 
make their own. 

Dickens always suggests to me a little child 
playing all by himself: a child clear eyed and 
smooth of brow, taking himself very seriously, 
aping the grown-ups, putting all his heart and 
soul into each fresh elaborate make-believe. He 
is surrounded by the creatures of his imagination 
that nevertheless bear a whimsical likeness to 
people he has known and half forgotten until this 
moment. 

" Let me see," he seems to say at a certain 
stage of the game, " I want a funny old learned 
schoolmaster who was never young and yet is 
rather childish. Come here — you and you and 
you. 

He summons the ghost of Dr. Everard, a 
worthy pedagogue of Brighton (where Dickens 
was at one time fond of spending week-ends), 
whose celebrated seminary was locally known as 
the ** Young House of Lords," because of the 
aristocracy of its pupils. " You be Doctor Blim- 
ber," says Dickens. " And you be Mrs. Blimber, 
madam. And you, my dear young lady, if you 
really don't mind, be Miss Cordelia." 

At another stage of the same game he is in 
urgent need of a nasty stiff proud man, and look- 
ing round him, hails a friend. " You, Chapman, 
be Mr. Dombey," says he. And forthwith Mr. 

290 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

Thomas Chapman is Mr. Dombey. He is so 
much like Mr. Dombey that Dickens had con- 
siderable trouble with the Phiz pictures ; he was 
so fearful of giving offence to his friend. That, of 
course, was after the game was over. And it some- 
how seems quite unnecessary for Forster to say 
of such high-spirited fun that " few things more 
absurd or unfounded have been invented, even 
of Dickens, than that he found any part of the 
original of Mr. Dombey in the nature, the ap- 
pearance, or the manners of his excellent and 
much-valued friend, Mr. Thomas Chapman, the 
chairman of Lloyd's, with whom he held frequent 
kindly intercourse . . . that . . . amiable and ex- 
cellent city-merchant . . . might with the same 
amount of justice or probability be supposed to 
have oriofinated Coriolanus orTimon of Athens." 

Of course he might ! In children's games the 
most inappropriate persons are invariably cast 
for the various parts, and it does not matter whe- 
ther they play their parts well or ill, so long as a 
child with the imagination and the verve of Dick- 
ens directs and controls the revelry. 

There was a Mrs. Campbell, also well-known 
in Leamington, whom a local jeweller describes 
as " laced up to the nines," and who bore such a 
close resemblance to Dickens' famous character 
that the jeweller once addressed her, absent- 
mindedly, as " Mrs. Skewton." " I am not Mrs. 
Skewton,"she is said to have replied indignantly. 
291 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

She had a daughter, who was probably as unlike 
the second Mrs. Dombey as only one beautiful 
young woman can be unlike another beautiful 
young woman. But Dickens said to her, in his 
usual light-hearted irresponsible way : " I want 
you. You must be Edith. And you, Mrs. Camp- 
bell, must be the faded Cleopatra. . . . Advance 
your shrivelled ear a little more this way, please. 
Thank you." And it was so. 

There was also a Mrs. Hayes, of Manchester, 
who died only a few years ago, aged ninety. Her 
maiden name was Littlefair ; and with such a 
Dickensy name as that it seems inevitable that 
in her youth she should have been a domestic 
servant in the household of Mr. Henry Burnett, 
Dickens' brother-in-law, whom he idealised as 
Nicholas Nickleby. And this dear old lady, un- 
like Mrs. Campbell of Leamington, always re- 
called with delight " wot larx " she had had in her 
girlhood with that there dreadful boy, Charles 
Dickens, who himself had often reminded her 
how he had used her for a character in more than 
one of his books, but most notably as Mrs. Polly 
Toodle, otherwise Richards, in Dombey and Son. 

Three other pleasant people Dickens made to 
play with him : Miss Strong, Mr. Jennings or | 
Jennens, and Captain Morgan, who figures in A 
Message from the Sea as Captain J organ, and 
who in real life was an American sailor for whom 
Dickens had conceived a great liking. 

292 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

Miss Strong was allotted the "fat" part of Betsy 
Trotwood, David Copperfield's delightful aunt. 

Mr. Ashby Sterry has taken great pains to 
identify Miss Trotwood's house at Dover, and 
believes that he has done so. One is, however, 
disinclined — though regretfully — to accept his 
evidences. One is more inclined to accept those 
of Mr. Kitton, who boldly affirms that the ori- 
ginal of Betsy Trotwood lived at Broadstairs. 
" She was a Miss Strong (says Mr. Kitton). She 
occupied a double-fronted cottage in the middle 
of Nuckell's Place, on the sea-front ; and like the 
admirable Betsy, she was firmly convinced of her 
right to stop the passage of donkeys along the 
road opposite her door, deterring their proprie- 
tors by means of hostile demonstrations with a 
hearth-broom." 

The original of Mr. Jarndyce was a Mr. Jenn- 
ings or Jennens. 

\xi Jarndyce v. Jarndyce^ as is well known, Dick- 
ens had in view a monstrous Chancery suit re- 
lating to the Jennings property, which had drag- 
ged on in the Courts for years, and in the end 
left nothing. The house was a deserted mansion 
at Acton, in Suffolk, which belonged to a notor- 
ious old miser Jennings or Jennens, who died 
in 1798, when ninety-seven years old. He made 
a will, but neither it nor executors could be found. 
At last the heir-at-law was traced in the person 
293 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

of the great-great-grandson of one C. Jennens, 
of Gopsal, the eldest uncle of the deceased — and 
who then entered into possession of the property. 
So lately as the year 1878 the case was in the 
Courts — ^just eighty years after the owner's death 
(says Mr. Fitzgerald in Bozland). 

But Dickens, as boys will, played a little care- 
lessly and clumsily and roughly sometimes, some- 
times even a little spitefully ; and then any girls 
who happened to be playing with him were likely 
to get hurt. In illustration of this there is, not- 
ably, the sad case of Miss Mowcher, who was in- 
troduced to David Copperfield by Steerforth,and 
who is described as 

a pursy dwarf, of about forty or forty-five, with 
a very large head and face, a pair of roguish 
grey eyes, and such extremely little arms that to 
enable herself to lay her finger archly against her 
snub nose as she ogled Steerforth, she was obliged 
to meet the finger half-way and lay her nose 
against it. Her chin, which was what is called 
a double-chin, was so fat that it entirely swal- 
lowed up the strings of her bonnet, bow and all. 
Throat she had none ; waist she had none ; legs 
she had none worth mentioning ; for though she 
was more than full-sized down to where her waist 
would have been, if she had had any, and though 
she terminated, as human beings generally do, 

294 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

in a pair of feet, she was so short that she stood 
at a common-sized chair as at a table, resting a 
bag she carried on the seat. This lady, dressed 
in an off-hand easy style, bringing her nose and 
her forefinger together with the difficulty I have 
described ; standing with her head necessarily 
on one side, and with one of her sharp eyes shut 
up making an uncommonly knowing face, after 
ogling Steerforth for a few moments, broke into 
a torrent of words. 

" What ! My flower ! " she pleasantly began, 
shaking her large head at him. "You're there, 
are you ! Oh, you naughty boy, fie for shame ! 
what do you do so far away from home ? Up to 
mischief, I'll be bound. Oh, you're a downy fel- 
low, Steerforth, so you are, and I'm another, ain't 
I ? Ha, ha, ha ! You'd have betted a hundred 
pound to five now, that you wouldn't have seen 
me here, wouldn't you? Bless you, man alive, I'm 
everywhere. I'm here, and there, and where not, 
like the conjurer's half-crown in the lady's hand- 
kercher. Talking of handkerchers — and talking 
of ladies — what a comfort you are to your blessed 
mother, ain't you, my dear boy, over one of my 
shoulders, and I don't say which ! " 

That was the Miss Mowcher of Dickens' fic- 
tion ; but there was also a real Miss Mowcher : her 
namewasMrs. Seymour Hill; and Dickens writes 
to Forster on 28th December 1849, whilst he was 
295 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

still in the throes oi David Coppe7'fie Id : " I have 
had the queerest adventure this morning, the re- 
ceipt of the enclosed from Miss Mowcher ! It is i] 
serio-comic, but there is no doubt one is wrong in f 
being tempted to such a use of power." How like 
the small boy, who having shown off his strength | 
to the girls is stricken with compunction, and 
says : " I didn't mean to hurt you, really." 

Forster remarks upon this unfortunate inci- 
dent : 

Thinking a grotesque little oddity among his ac- 
quaintance to be safe from recognition, he had 
done what Smollett did sometimes, but never 
Fielding, and given way, in the first outburst of 
fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the 
temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of 
figure and face amounting in effect to deformity. 
He was shocked at discovering the pain he had 
given, and a copy is before me of the assurances 
by way of reply which he at once sent to the com- 
plainant. That he was grieved and surprised be- 
yond measure. That he had not intended her 
altogether. That all his characters, being made 
up out of many people, were composite and never 
individual. That the chair (for table) and other 
matters were undoubtedlyfromher,but that other 
traits were not hers at all ; and that in Miss 
Mowcher's " Ain't I volatile " his friends had 
quite correctly recognised the favourite utter- 

296 




DETECTIVE FIELD 
"Inspector Bucket" 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

ance of a different person. That he felt never- 
theless he had done wrong, and would now do 
anything to repair it. That he had intended to 
employ the character in an unpleasant way, but 
he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, 
change it all, so that nothing but an agreeable 
impression should be left. 

The other instance of a girl who might have 
got very badly hurt whilst playing with Master 
Dickens, but who apparently escaped by a mir- 
acle of un-self-consciousness, was she who was 
cast for the part of that most unpleasant young 
lady, Miss Rosa Dartle. " There are (says For- 
ster) some natural traits in her — which Dickens' 
least lifelike people are never without ; and it 
was from one of his lady friends, very familiar to 
him indeed, that he copied her peculiarity of 
never saying anything outright, but hinting it 
merely, and making more of it that way." 

Miss Rosa Dartle is described by David as 
being 

of a slight short figure, dark, and not agreeable 
to look at, but with some appearance of good 
looks too, who attracted my attention : perhaps 
because I had not expected to see her : perhaps 
because I found myself sitting opposite to her : 
perhaps because of something really remarkable 
in her. She had black hair and eager black eyes, 
and was thin, and had a scar upon her lip. It was 
297 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS *' 

an old scar — I should rather call it seam, for it 
was not discoloured and had healed years ago — 
which had once cut through her mouth, down-| 
ward towards the chin, but was now barely vis- 
ible across the table, except above and on her 
upper lip, the shape of which it had altered. I 
concluded in my own mind that she was about 
thirty years of age, and that she wished to be 
married. She was a little dilapidated — like a 
house — with having been so long to let ; yet had, 
as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her 
thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting 
fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt 
eyes. 

Now, do you know, whenever I read that de- 
scription — that description barbed and tipped 
with caustic — I always feel that Dickens had 
some living person in his mind whom he viru- 
lently disliked ; and I have always a sense of re- 
lief at the thought that his lady friend, mentioned 
by Forster, never realised how her own trivial 
peculiarities of speech had been grafted on to this 
object of Dickens' profound dislike. I am always 
very glad to know that the lady did not know 
how terribly near she was to getting very badly 
hurt indeed. 

Of the other characters which belong to this 
chapter, and which (for convenience' sake) I have 

298 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

dubbed " minor," though few of them are in any 
sense " minor," I would mention, first, Gaffer 
Hexam and Charlie Hexam, who exhibit in their 
two personalities one of the most effective studies 
in contrast that even Dickens conceived. And 
they were derived from a mere passing glimpse 
of two commonplace figures in the street. 

" I must use somehow," says Dickens in one of 
his letters to Forster, " the uneducated father in 
fustian and the educated boy in spectacles whom 
Leech and I saw at Chatham." 

He did use them in Our Mutual Friend, used 
them as the lever and the fulcrum upon which to 
raise the whole weighty question of popular edu- 
cation. Between the wild fierce man, with the 
hooked nose, the bright glancing eyes, and the 
ruffled head, that gave him a certain likeness to a 
bird of prey : between that coarse ignorant man, 
and that insufferable prig, his son, whose scholar- 
ly attainments only served to afflict him with a 
worse coarseness and a more grievous ignorance : 
a coarseness of soul far worse than any coarse- 
ness of fibre, a coarseness that blunted all his 
finer feelings, and an ignorance of the heart far 
worse than any ignorance of the mind, an ignor- 
ance that left him in the outer darkness and lone- 
liness of utter separation from his kin : between 
these two there is a contrast struck, there is a 
great gulf fixed, that all the Education Acts of 
thelast fortyyears have beenpowerlessto bridge. 
299 



1 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

It needed the eyes of a prophet to see the signi- 
ficance of those two figures of the uneducated 
father in fustian and the educated boy in specta- 
cles, already in his childhood taking short views 
of life. Dickens did see the significance of that 
queer unnatural and yet natural juxtaposition of 
two alien minds in two bodies thatwere one flesh. 
He had, when he saw this, grown up a little ; but 
there was still enough of the immortal child left 
in him to exaggerate these figures into gigantic 
portents. One has not to go far to find the origi- 
nals of Gaffer Hexam and his boy, Charlie ; the 
Gaffer is in every slum, Charlie in every suburb. 
It was from similar fleeting impressions of 
small things involving great issues that Dickens 
spun the filaments of the tangle oi Edwin Drood, 
and created the atmosphere of such fine moral 
tales as Tom Tiddlers Grou7td. Mr. Mopes the 
Hermit was founded on a poor besotted wretch, 
James Lucas, known as Mad Lucas, of Kneb- 
worth, a miser who lived in the kitchen of his 
house, Elmwood House, at Redcoats Green, near 
Stevenage. James Lucas, " the Hertfordshire 
Hermit," was really a well-educated and highly 
intellectual man, who inherited the estate of his 
father, a prosperous West India merchant, and it 
is conjectured that his distress at the death of his 
widowed mother (who lived with him) was pri- 
marily the cause of that mental aberration which 
assumed such an eccentric form. Heeven refused 

300 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

to bury her corpse, so that the local authorities 
were compelled to resort to a subterfuge in order 
to perform themselves the last rites. He objected 
to furnish his rooms, and, attired simply in a loose 
blanket fastened with a skewer, preferred to eat 
and sleep amidst the cinders and rubbish-heaps 
(a sanctuary for rats) which accumulated in the 
kitchen. Althouorh his diet consisted of bread- 
and-cheese, red herrings, and gin, there were 
choice wines available for friendly visitors, a spe- 
cial vintage of sherry being reserved for ladies 
who thus honoured him. The hermit' spenc/tan^ 
for tramps attracted all the vagabonds in the 
neighbourhood, so that it became necessary for 
him to protect himself from insult by retaining 
armed watchmen and barricading the house. 
That he sat for Mr. Mopes is certain from the 
fact that, on reading Tom Tiddler s Ground, he 
expressed great indignation at what he consider- 
ed to be a much exaggerated account of himself 
and his environment. 

Dickens describes him, and denounces his 
cult, thus : 

Mr. Traveller . . . betook himself towards the 
ruined hermitage of Mr. Mopes the hermit. 

For Mr. Mopes, by suffering everything about 
him to go to ruin, and by dressing himself in a 
blanket and skewer, and by steeping himself in 
soot and grease and other nastiness,had acquired 
301 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

great renown in all that countryside — far greater 
renown than he could ever have won for him- 
self, if his career had been that of any ordinary 
Christian or decent Hottentot. He had even 
blanketed and skewered and sooted and greased 
himself into the London papers. And it was 
curious to find, as Mr. Traveller found by stop- 
ping for a new direction at this farmhouse or at 
that cottage as he went along, with how much 
accuracy the morbid Mopes had counted on the 
weakness of his neighbours to embellish him. A 
mist of home-brewed marvel and romance sur- 
rounded Mopes, in which (as in all fogs) the real 
proportions of the real object were extravagantly 
heightened. . . . Even as to the easy facts of 
how old he was, or how long he had held vermin- 
ous occupation of his blanket and skewer, no 
consistent information was to be got, from those 
who must know if they would. He was repre- 
sented as being all the ages between five-and- 
twenty and sixty, and as having been a hermit 
seven years, twelve, twenty, thirty, — though 
twenty on the whole appeared to be the favourite 
term. 

"Well, well! "said Mr. Traveller. "At any rate 
let us see what a real live hermit looks like." 
So Mr. Traveller went on, and on, and on, until 
he came to Tom Tiddler's Ground. 

It was a nook in a rustic by-road, which the 
genius of Mopes had laid waste, as if he had been 

302 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

born an Emperor and a Conqueror. Its centre 
object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently sub- 
stantial, all the window-glass of which had been 
long ago abolished by the surprising genius of 
Mopes, and all the windows of which were barred 
across with rough-split logs of trees nailed over 
them on the outside. A rickyard, hip-high in 
vegetable rankness and ruin, contained outbuild- 
ings, from which the thatch had lightly fluttered 
away, on all the winds of all the seasons of the 
year, and from which the planks and beams had 
heavily dropped and rotted. The frosts and 
damps of winter, and the heats of summer, had 
warped what wreck remained, so that not a post 
or a board retained the position it was meant to 
hold, but everything was twisted from its pur- 
pose, like its owner, and degraded and debased. 
In this homestead of the sluggard, behind the 
ruined hedge, and sinking away among the 
ruined grass and the nettles, were the last perish- 
ing fragments of certain ricks: which had gradu- 
ally mildewed and collapsed, until they looked 
like mounds of rotten honeycomb, or dirty 
sponge. Tom Tiddler's Ground could even show 
its ruined water ; for there was a slimy pond into 
which a tree or two had fallen — one soppy trunk 
and branches lay across it then — which in its 
accumulation of stagnant weed, and in its black 
decomposition, and in all its foulness and filth, 
was almost comforting, regarded as the only 
303 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

water that could have reflected the shameful 
placewithout seeming polluted by that low office. 

The Traveller opens the outer gate of these 
premises. 

Swung upon its rusty hinges, it admitted him 
into a yard in which there was nothing to be seen 
but an outhouse attached to the ruined building, 
with a barred window in it. As there were traces 
of many recent footsteps under this window, and 
as it was a low window, and unglazed, Mr. 
Traveller made bold to peep within the bars. 
And there to be sure he had a real live Hermit 
before him, and could judge how the real dead 
Hermits used to look. 

He was lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on 
the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace. There was I 
nothing else in the dark little kitchen, or scullery, 
or whatever else his den had been originally used 
as, but a table with a litter of old bottles on it. A 
rat made a clatter among these bottles, jumped 
down, and ran over the real live hermit on his 
way to his hole, or the man in his hole would not 
have been so easily discernible. Tickled in the 
face by the rat's tail, the owner of Tom Tiddler's 
Ground opened his eyes, saw Mr. Traveller, 
started up, and sprang to the window. 

" Humph ! " thought Mr. Traveller, retiring a 
pace or two from the bars. ** A compound of 
Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtor's Prison in the worst 

304 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble 
Savage ! A nice old family, the Hermit family ! 
Hah!" 

Mr. Traveller thought this, as he silently con- 
fronted the sooty object in the blanket and 
skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing else), with 
the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, 
Mr. Traveller thought, as the eyes surveyed him 
with a very obvious curiosity in ascertaining the 
effect they produced, " Vanity, vanity, vanity ! 
Verily, all is vanity ! " 

I have dwelt thus upon this study of Mr. 
Mopes, because it seems to me to illustrate once 
again, with profound truth and irresistible force, 
Dickens' almost preternatural sense of the deep 
significance of things that to the casual observer 
seem merely crazy and unmeaning. Dickens re- 
alised, when he saw Mr. Mopes — if he had never 
realised it before — that there is a pride of sin and 
silliness and sloth, filth and ugliness and beastli- 
ness, as well as a pride of goodness and wisdom 
and endeavour, beauty and cleanliness and god- 
liness. That Dickens should exclaim : "Vanity! 
Verily, all is vanity ! " on beholding the spect- 
acle of this abandoned wretch's degradation, tes- 
tifies to the penetrating quality of his genius as 
perhaps no other passage in all his more impor- 
tant work does. 

From another side of his many-sided genius 
305 u 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

he flashes a light upon the possibilities of ro- 
mance that lie hidden from the eyes of us aver- 
age folk amid the most squalid and revolting 
surroundings. Froma glimpse into the interior of 
an opium-den he drew inspiration for that shin- 
ing chain of weird imaginings only a few links 
of which he forged in the unsolved Mystery of 
Edwin Drood. 

The scene of John Jasper's horrible de-il 
bauches was just beyond the churchyard of Saint 
George's-in-the-East, at Stepney. The Rever- 
end Harry Jones, rector from 1873 to 1882, men- 
tions that the old crone was known as Lascar 
Sal, and was living at the time he wrote, 1875. 
" In a miserable court at night," writes Mr. James 
T. Fields, who was Dickens' companion on the 
occasion of his visit to this opium-den, " we found 
a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe 
made of an old ink-bottle ; and the words that 
Dickens puts into the mouth of this wretched 
creature in Edwin Drood, we heard her croon as 
we leaned over the tattered bed in which she was 
lymg. 

But it would be only too easy to multiply in- 
stances from Dickens' books of great events 
springing from the most trivial causes, of fine 1 
effects achieved by dint of sheer imagination ap- ' 
plied to the most commonplace incidents and 
accidents of everyday life. 

306 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

" Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evi- 
dently borrowed from the recent fall of houses 
in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to 
have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient 
period," says the Edinburgh Revietv of August 
1857. Could pompous inanity bray more discord- 
antly, more flatulently? Even. . . . Here as- 
suredly is a case of the fool that came to scoff 
remaining — if not to pray — to pay the highest 
possible tribute that ever egregious ignorance 
and purblind superciliousness ever did pay to the 
greatness that it was far too little to comprehend. 
The crowning wonder and glory of Dickens lay 
in his power of transmuting the commonest ma- 
terial into purest gold. The news of the day, the 
gossip of an hour, he laid under the spell to his 
genius, and retold as a fairy tale. 

He transmuted that most wooden and unmal- 
leable of all English types, the policeman turned 
detective, into an immortal, named him Bucket, 
and — as it were in his stride — invented the whole 
art and craft of detective-story-writing as it is 
practised to-day. Inspector Bucket of the De- 
tective was founded on Inspector Field, who also 
figures as Detective Wield in Reprinted Pieces ^ 
and is therein described as " a middle-aged man 
of pordy presence, with a large, moist, knowing 
eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his 
conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger, 
which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes 
307 



1 

yed| 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

or nose," and in Bleak House as " a sharp-e 
man — a quick keen man — who takes in every 
body's look at him, all at once, individually and 
collectively, in a manner that stamps him a re- 
markable man. . . . Mr. Bucket and his fat 
forefinger are much in consultation together. . . . 
When Mr. Bucket has a matter of pressing in- 
terest under his consideration, the fat forefinger 
seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. 
He puts it to his ears, and it whispers informa- 
tion ; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to 
secrecy ; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens 
his scent ; he shakes it before a guilty man, and 
it charms him to his destruction. The Augurs 
of the Detective Temple invariably predict that 
when Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much 
conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of 
before long." But all that Inspector Field pro- 
vided was the clothes, which he doubtless wore 
with the air of wearing a uniform ; it was Dickens 
who filled those clothes with the concentrated es- 
sence of that modern wonder-worker who bulks 
so large in so many tales, and whom we know 
most familiarly as Sherlock Holmes. 

And then there is Gridley, the Man from 
Shropshire, also, whose "case (says Dickens in 
his preface to Bleak House) is in no essential 
altered from one of actual occurrence, made pub- 
lic by a disinterested person who was profession- 
ally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous 

308 



SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 

wrong from beginning to end." He, like that 
other obscure litigant Jennens, like the unedu- 
cated father in fustian and the educated boy in 
spectacles, like Mad Lucas of Knebworth and 
that other nameless madman of the Oxford Road, 
like Lascar Sal and Miss Strong and Mr. Willis ; 
all these are as shadows or names : as shadows 
on a blind, without colour or substance; as names 
in a directory . . . until Dickens chances upon 
them. And then his genius transforms them into 
beings of more than flesh and blood, huge crea- 
tures that fill the purview like a mountain and 
touch the clouds, as the smoke that poured out 
from the fisherman's pot, in the Arabian Nights^ 
filled the air and darkened the sky, and then, im- 
perceptibly, invested itself with the magic and 
the charm of genius. 



CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 




JUDGE TALFOURD 

"Tommv Traddles" 



CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 

SOME DICKENS'CONTEMPORARIES 

IT IS ODD THAT DICKENS, IN HIS 
attempts to draw the portraits of some of his con- 
temporaries, should have only succeeded (as it 
were by inadvertence) in lampooning two men 
whom he liked extremely, and have failed to 
flatter a man whom he did not like nearly so well. 

But before we approach the vexed question of 
the identities of Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage 
Landor, and John Forster, there are Miss Har- 
riet Martineau, Judge Talfourd, and Sir Peter 
Lawrie to be considered. Of Sir Peter Lawrie 
it is enough to say that he was instantly recog- 
nised as the original of Alderman Cute in The 
Chimes, a magistrate who, like Sir Peter himself, 
expressed a strong determination to put down 
all offences in general, and suicide in particular, 
by the most drastic methods. 

In April 1844, writing to Tom Hood, whose 
Song of the Shirt had appeared in the last Christ- 
mas number of Punch, Dickens calls his atten- 
tion to the case of an unfortunate sempstress 
" making shirts at three-halfpence apiece," who, 
being robbed of her wretched earnings, attempted 
to drown herself, and was told from the bench, 
among other cruel things, that she had " no hope 
of mercy either in this world or in the world to 
come." Very shortly afterward The Bridge of 
Sighs was published in Hood's Magazine. 
313 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

But — to take the next name on our list — it 
would never have been assumed, I think, that 
Miss Martineau had any least affinity with Mrs. 
Jellyby if she had not gone out of her way to 
attack Dickens for his satire upon the Borrio- 
boola Gha type of philanthropy. Certainly be- 
tween the plucky, afflicted, learned, and inde- 
fatigable author of so many and such various 
works as Deerbrook, The Hour and the Man, 
The Peasant and the Prince, Eastern Life, Past 
and Present, and countless other volumes of fic- 
tion, theology, history, criticism, and philosophy, 
which poured from her untiring pen, there is little 
apparent resemblance to the "pretty, very dimi- 
nutive, plump woman, of from forty to fifty, with 
handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit 
of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . 
they could see nothing nearer than Africa ! . . . 
Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair, but was too 
much occupied with her African duties to brush 
it. The shawl in which she had been loosely 
muffled, dropped on to her chair . . . and as she 
turned to resume her seat, we could not help 
noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the 
back, and that the open space was railed across 
with a lattice-work of staylace — like a summer- 
house." 

It really was something of an outrage to com- 
pare the neat, prim, patient, and rather severe 
Miss Martineau with this little, fat, comely, smil- 

314 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

ing, placid, preoccupied, good-natured mother of 
a swarming progeny in which she took no least in- 
terest. 

In Tommy Traddles, however, Dickens did in- 
dicate something of the fine pathetic quality of 
his friend, Judge Talfourd. His public tribute to 
the memory of his friend may be quoted in this 
connection, quite appropriately, I think. 



This upright judge and good man died suddenly 
at Stafford in the discharge of his duties. Merci- 
fully spared protracted pain and mental decay, he 
passed away in a moment, with words of Chris- 
tian eloquence, of brotherly tenderness and kind- 
ness towards all men, yet unfinished on his lips. 

As he died he had always lived. So amiable 
a man, so gentle, so sweet-tempered, of such a 
noble simplicity, so perfectly unspoiled by his 
labours and their rewards, is very rare indeed 
upon this earth. . . . 

The chief delight of his life was to give delight 
to others. His nature was so exquisitely kind 
that to be kind was its highest happiness. Those 
who had the privilege of seeing him in his own 
home when his public successes were greatest — 
so modest, so contented with little things, so in- 
terested in humble persons and humble efforts, 
so surrounded by children and young people, so 
adored in remembrance of a domestic generosity 
315 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

and greatness of heart too sacred to be unveiled 
here, can never forget the pleasure of that 



sight. 



The hand that lays this poor flower on his grave 
was a mere boy's when he first clasped it — 
newly come from the work in which he himself 
began life — little used to the plough it has follow- 
ed since — obscure enough, with much to correct 
and learn. Each of its successive tasks through 
many intervening years has been cheered by his 
warmest interest, and the friendship then begun 
has ripened to maturity in the passage of time ; 
but there was no more self-assertion or conde- 
scension in his winning goodness at first than at 
last. The success of other men made as little 
change in him as his own. 

But we do seem to get a glimpse of Traddles 
in the more comic and sincere, loyal and lovable 
Talfourd, in the Talfourd whom Forster de- 
scribes in his more prosaic fashion as "facile and 
fluent of kindliest speech," and as assuming 
nothing with the ermine but the privilege of 
more frequent intercourse with the tastes and 
friends he loved, but continuing to be the most 
joyous and least affected of companions. " Such 
small oddities or foibles as he had (says Forster) 
made him secretly only dearer to Dickens, who 
had no friend he was more attached to ; and the 
many happy nights made happier by the voice so 

316 



I 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

affluent in generous words, and the face so bright 
with ardent sensibility, come back to me sorrow- 
fully now." 

It was in 1844 that Talfourd assisted Dickens 
to put an end to the piracy of his writings, every 
one of which had been reproduced with merely 
such colourable changes of titles, incidents and 
names of characters, as were believed to be suf- 
ficient to evade the law, and adapt them to 
"penny" purchasers. So shamelessly had this 
been going on ever since the days oi Pickwick, in 
so many outrageous ways and with all but im- 
punity, that a course repeatedly urged by Tal- 
fourd and Forster was at last taken in this year 
with the Christmas Carol and the Chuzzlewit 
pirates. Upon a case of such peculiar flagrancy, 
however, that the vice-chancellor would not even 
hear Dickens' counsel; and what it cost our dear 
friend Talfourd (says Forster) to suppress his 
speech exceeded by very much the labour and 
pains with which he had prepared it. "The 
pirates," wrote Dickens. . "are beaten flat. They 
are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed,squelched, 
and utterly undone. Knight Bruce wouldnot hear 
Talfourd, but instantly gave judgment. He had 
interrupted Anderton constantly by asking him 
to produce a passage which was not an expanded 
or contracted idea from my book. And at every 
successive passage he cried out, 'That is Mr. Dic- 
kens' case. Find another ! Oh, the agony of Tal- 

317 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

fourdat Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had 
sat up till three in the morning, he says, prepar- 
ing his speech." 

There were few finer characters in real life 
than Judge Talfourd, as there are few finer char- 
acters in Dickens than Tommy Traddles. 

Poor Traddles! In a tight sky-blue suit that 
made his arms and legs like German sausages, or 
roly-poly puddings, he was the merriest and most 
miserable of all the boys. He was always being 
caned . . . and was always going to write to his 
uncle about it, and never did. After laying his 
head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer 
up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw 
skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were 
dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort 
Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for 
some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, 
who reminded himself by those symbols of mor- 
tality that caning couldn't last for ever. But I be- 
lieve he only did it because they were easy, and 
didn't want any features. 

He was very honourable, Traddles was, and 
held it as a solemn duty in the boys to stand 
by one another. He suffered for this on several 
occasions ; and particularly once, when Steer- 
forth laughed in church and the Beadle thought 
it was Traddles, and took him out. I see him now, 
going away in custody, despised by the congrega- 

318 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

tion. He never said who was the real offender, 
though he smarted for it next day, and was im- 
prisoned so many hours that he came forth with 
a whole churchyardful of skeletons swarming all 
over his Latin dictionary. "But he had his re- 
ward," says Dickens. 

Ay, verily, he had his reward! 

'* Mis-ter and Mis-sis Podsnap!" 

" My dear," says Mr. Veneeringto Mrs. Veneer- 
ing, with an air of much friendly interest, while 
the door stands open, "the Podsnaps." 

A too, too smiling large man, with a fatal fresh- 
ness on him, appearing with his wife, instantly de- 
serts his wife and darts at Twemlow with : 

" How do you do ? So glad to know you. Char- 
ming house you have here. I hope we are not late. 
So glad of this opportunity, I am sure." 

When the first shock fell upon him, Twemlow 
twice skipped back in his neat little shoes and his 
neat little silk stockings of a bygone fashion, as 
if impelled to leap over a sofa behind him; but 
the large man closed with him and proved too 
stronof. 

" Let me," says the large man, trying to attract 
the attention of his wife in the distance, " have 
the pleasure of presenting Mrs. Podsnap to her 
host. She will be," in his fatal freshness he seems 
to find perpetual verdure and eternal youth in the 
319 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

phrase, "she will be so glad of this opportunity, 
I am sure ! " 

. . . In this complicated dilemma, Mr. Veneer- 
ing approaches the large man with extended 
hand, and smilingly assures that incorrigible per- 
sonage that he is delighted to see him : who in 
his fatal freshness instantly replies : 

" Thank you. I am ashamed to say that I can- 
not at this moment recall where we met, but I am 
so glad of this opportunity, I am sure ! " . . . 

The orreat lookingf-o-lass above the sideboard 
reflects . . . Podsnap, preposterously feeding, two 
little light-coloured, wiry wings, one on either 
side of his else bald head, looking as like his hair- 
brushes as his hair, dissolving view of red beads 
on his forehead, large allowance of shirt-collar up 
behind. . . . 

Mr. Podsnap was well-to-do, and stood very 
high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with 
a ofood inheritance, he had married a o-ood inherit- 
ance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine 
Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never 
could make out why everybody was not quite 
satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a 
brilliant social example in being particularly well 
satisfied with most things, and above all other 
things, with himself. 

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and 
importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever 
he put behind him he put out of existence. There 

320 



I 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

was a dignified conclusiveness — not to say a 
grand convenience — in this way of getting rid 
of disagreeables, which had done much towards 
establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place in 
Mr. Podsnap's satisfaction. " I don't want to 
know about it ; I don't choose to discuss it ; I 
don't admit it ! " Mr. Podsnap had even acquired 
a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clear- 
ing the world of its most difficult problems by 
sweeping them behind him (and consequently 
sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. 
For they affronted him, 

Mr. Podsnap's world was not a very large world, 
morally; no, nor even geographically: seeingthat 
although his business was sustained upon com- 
merce with other countries, he considered other 
countries, with that important reservation, a mis- 
take, and of their manners and customs would 
conclusively observe, "Not English!" when, 
Presto ! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush 
of the face, they were swept away. . . . 

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr. Podsnap 
was sensible of its being required of him to take 
Providence under his protection. Consequently 
he always knew exactly what Providence meant. 
Inferior and less respectable men might fall short 
of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was always up to 
it. And it was very remarkable (and must have 
been very comfortable) that what Providence 
meant was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant. 
321 X 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

A really repellent monster, this Podsnap. And 
yet . . . intimates recognised in this ugly pic- 
ture a portrait of Dickens' chosen friend, close 
confidant, and official biographer, John Forster 
himself. 

To his friend, John Forster (says Mr. Fitz- 
gerald, who was pretty well acquainted with both 
Forster and Dickens) was submitted everything 
he wrote, who conscientiously exercised his 
office of reviser and suggester of improvements 
during a long course of years — a troublesome 
and laborious task when thoroughly carried out. 
Forster had often a substantial share in directing 
the course of the stories, and we find passages 
omitted and phrases altered at his suggestion. 1 1 
was a bold thing, therefore, under such condi- 
tions, to introduce his friend in a shape that was 
recognisable. It may be thought that this was 
hardly a " correct " thing, but I really believe 
Dickens was helpless in the matter, and was all 
but compelled by the pressure of his story, and 
its situations, to introduce such a character. It 
was a general type, of which Forster's was the 
species. A professional observer as he was, he 
relished any of the specially humorous traits of 
his friend with the keenest enjoyment ; and these 
certainly belonged to the highest form of comedy. 

Forster, it would appear, was not very popu- 
lar among his contemporaries ; and if he did 

322 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

indeed resemble Podsnap — or Doctor Johnson, 
whom he is said also to have resembled — one 
cannot wonder at his unpopularity. Whatever 
else he may have been, however, he was a con- 
stant and devoted friend to Dickens ; and if my 
opinion counts for anything in this connection, I 
think that his biography stands as a monument 
of staunch, deep, and discerning friendship. 
When he died it was said by The Times that, al- 
though many were disposed at first sight to think 
him obstinate and overbearing, they were bound 
in the long run to confess that they had in reality 
found him to be one of the tenderest and most 
generous of men. I am well satisfied to let The 
Times have the last word. 

But . . . therearesome who say that in depict- 
ing Podsnap Dickens was unconsciously depict- 
ing himself, as he was in the latter part of his life. 
I don't think it really matters; but certainly some 
of Dickens' public utterances might have been 
put into the mouth of Podsnap without any glar- 
ing incongruity. Though this is merely to state 
the obvious, after all, since there must always 
be something of the author in every one of his 
characters. 

I think it most unlikely that Dickens had any 
thought of his friend Forster in his mind when he 
projected Podsnap. But I do think it most likely 
that he had Leigh Hunt in his mind when he pro- 
323 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

jected Harold Skimpole ; and that he lampooned 
Leigh Hunt, as it were in his own despite. 

But Dickens himself, writing in All the Year 
Round on the Christmas Eve of 1859, and in a 
letter to Leigh Hunt himself, has said all that 
needs to be said on this point. 

Four or five years ago, the writer of these lines 
was much pained by accidentally encountering 
a printed statement, " that Mr. Leigh Hunt was 11 
the original of Harold SkAm^oX^m Bleak House." || 
The statement came from America. Itisnodis- ' 
respect to that country, in which the writer has 
perhaps as many friends and as true an interest ij 
as any man that lives, good-humouredly to state 
the fact that he has now and then been the sub- 
ject of paragraphs in Transatlantic newspapers, 
more surprisingly destitute of all foundation in 
truth than the wildest delusions of the wildest 
lunatics. For reasons born of this experience, he 
let the thing go by. 

But since Mr. Leigh Hunt's death the statement 
has been revived in England. The delicacy and 
generosity evinced in its revival arefor the rather 
late consideration of its revivers. The fact is this : 
Exactly those graces and charms of manner 
which are remembered . . . were remembered by 
theauthor of the workof fiction in question, when 
he drew the character in question. Above all 
other things, that sort of gay and ostentatious 

324 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

wilfulness in the humouring of a subject, which 
had many a time delighted him, and impressed 
him as being unspeakably whimsical and attrac- 
tive, was the airy quality he wanted for the man 
he invented. Partly for this reason, and partly 
(he has since often grieved to think) for the plea- 
sure it afforded him to find that deliehtful manner 
reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to 
the temptation of too often making the character 
speak like his old friend. He no more thought, 
God forgive him ! that the admired original would 
ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the 
fictitious creature, than he has himself ever 
thought of charging the blood of Desdemonaand 
Othello, on the innocent Academy model who sat 
for lago's leg in the picture. Even as to the mere 
occasional manner, he meant to be so cautious 
and conscientious, that he privately referred the 
proof sheets of the first number of that book to 
two intimate literary friends of Leigh Hunt (both 
still living), and altered the whole of that part of 
the text on their discovering too strong a resem- 
blance to his " way." 

H is letter to Leigh H unt himself is as follows : 

Separate in your own mind what you see of your- 
self from what other people tell you that they see. 
As it has given you so much pain, I take it at its 
worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel 
I did wrong in doing it. I should otherwise have 
325 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

taken it at its best, and ridden off upon what I 
strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing 
in it that should have given you pain. Every one 
in writing must speak from points of his experi- 
ence, and so I of mine with you : but when I have 
felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and 
the most blotted parts of my MSS. are those in 
which I have been striving hard to make the im- 
pression I was writing from unlike you. The 
diary writing I took from Hay don, not from you. 
I now first learn from yourself that you ever set 
anything to music, and I could not have copied 
that from you. The character is not you, for there 
are traits in it common to fifty thousand people 
besides, and I did not fancy you would ever re- 
cognise it. Under similar disguises my own fa- 
ther and mother are in my books, and you might 
as well see your likeness in Micawber. 

This chapter begins by saying it is odd that 
Dickens, in his attempts to draw the portraits of 
some of his contemporaries, should have only 
succeeded (as it were by inadvertence) in lam- 
pooning two men whom he liked extremely, and 
have failed to flatter a man whom he did not like 
so well. The man last referred to is Walter Sav- 
age Landor. 

I have already said that I think it is often too 
lightly assumed that Dickens was very ill-ac- 
quainted with the work of his immediate prede- 

326 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

cessors and contemporaries in the higher walks 
of Hterature; though, beyond question, there was 
never anything of the mere bookman about him 
at any time. And that probably, in his early days, 
he knew surprisingly little of the great poets who 
had attained their apogee when he was only just 
emerging from his swaddling-clothes. But we do 
know that he was intimate with Walter Savage 
Landor during the latter part of his life, and liked 
him. At the same time it cannot be gainsaid that 
his liking was tinctured with a feeling of some- 
thing perilously akin to good-natured tolerance. 
In one of his letters to Forster this significant 
reference occurs : " As Landor would say, ' most 
woonderful'"; and somehow that seems to sug- 
gest rather a keen sense of the humour of the 
personal friend's peculiarities and mannerisms 
than any very adequate appreciation of the great 
poet and satirist's superb qualities of mind. 

Now Landor was a born rebel. Because of his 
outspoken sympathies with the French Revolu- 
tionaries he had been known at Oxford as the 
" mad Jacobin," and eventually rusticated there- 
from. All his life he had held the most hetero- 
dox views on every conceivable subject — among 
others, that Napoleon was a ridiculously over- 
rated man. He was indeed as much an insurgent 
in temperament as either Shelley or Byron, 
whose unpopular views on politics and religion 
he shared and espoused. But it is plain that 
327 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

Dickens miraculously escaped these influences 
which so deeply affected other young men of his 
age and time. He could hardly have been entire- 
ly ignorant of the existence of these turbulent 
spirits ; but presumably he was not attracted by 
their mutinous methods, and did not trouble to 
investigate for himself their claims to a fair and 
impartial hearing. In short, it is most likely that 
if he considered them at all, he adopted the con- 
ventional thin attitude toward them of scornful 
indifference, shot with bewilderment and horror. 
Thus he was never in sympathy with Landor ; 
he could not understand him ; and so he failed 
woefully in his attempt to draw a flattering por- 
trait of him as Lawrence Boythorn. He failed 
to make Lawrence Boythorn live. You don't 
really believe in Boythorn. He is too harshly col- 
oured, too flat, too opaque, too loud, too crude 
altogether. You feel that you don't know Boy- 
thorn, and don't very much want to know him : 
certainly he never comes within leagues of in- 
teresting you as Skimpole does. For he does not 
seem to be himself at all. He seems to be all the 
time trying to impersonate some one else. He is 
as much 2iposeurm his way as Major Bagstock. 
At least that is how he appears to one reader of 
Dickens. And I am encouraged in this view by 
Dickens' own words when he says : " He was 
one of the few men of whom you might always 
know the whole : of whom you might always 

328 




JOHN FORSTER 
Dowet," "Podsnap' 



DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 

know the worst, as well as the best. He had no 
reservations or duplicities. ' No, by Heaven ! ' 
he would say (with unimaginable energy) if any 
good adjective were coupled with him which he 
did not deserve : * I am nothingf of the kind. I 
wish I were ; but I don't deserve the attribute, 
and I never did, and I never shall ! ' His intense 
consciousness of himself never led to his poorly 
excusing himself, and seldom to his violently as- 
serting himself." 

But it was precisely because Dickens accepted 
Landor at his face value that he deceived him- 
self about Landor. Landor was a man of infinite 
subtlety. Only a man of infinite subtlety could 
have written the dialogues between Bossuet and 
the Duchess de Fontanges, and Peter the Great 
and his son, in which the pungent irony stings 
upon the palate like strong wine. Only a man 
of infinite subtlety could, with such adroit art and 
consummate mastery of his means, have belittled 
Plato and extolled Alfieri as the greatest man of 
his time. His Imaginary Conversations stand as 
the product of thoughts as intricate and delicate 
as the convolutions of the human brain itself. 
Dickens respected Landor for the qualities that 
they shared in common : for his " noble scorn of 
all littleness, all cruelty, oppression, fraud, and 
false pretence." It was on the score of those quali- 
ties that Dickens tried to glorify Landor in Bleak 
House. But these were merely the qualities that 
329 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

made Landor a gentleman. The qualities that 
made him a genius Dickens did not understand. 
Thus it is that Landor, as Boythorn, seems to be 
something of a gentleman, certainly ; but at the 
same time rather an old fool. 



CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 
DICKENS HIMSELF 



CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 

OF CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 

THAT LIVELY PERCEPTION OF THE 

ludicrous which we all possess in greater or smal- 
ler measure, has been very rightly called the sav- 
ing sense of humour. It saves our souls alive. It 
saves our hearts from breaking. It saves us from 
all manner of folly and wickedness and sorrow 
and despair. In effect, it saves us from our worst 
enemy, who is oftenest ourself. 

But the humour sense manifests itself in vastly 
dissimilar ways. There are many kinds and de- 
grees of the sense. It varies in different climes 
and in different ages. It waxes and wanes with 
our growth and decline, and assumes as many 
colours and forms in the course of a life as the 
procession of the seasons assumes in the course 
of a year. It is raw and crude in our infancy, 
full-blooded and flamboyant and boisterous in 
the hot summer of our lusty youth, ripe and mel- 
low and kindly in our autumnal prime, and cold 
and bleak and comfortless in the wintry cynicism 
of old age. 

It has been asserted that most men would 
rather plead guilty to every crime in the Deca- 
logue than to a lack of humour. " A man without 
humour in himself," Shakespeare might have 
said, just as aptly, if he had thought of it, "is 
only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; let 
333 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

no such man be trusted." And Emerson does say 
that "a man alive to the ludicrous is still con- 
vertible," and further that "when that sense is 
lost his fellow-men can do little for him." Against 
this latter saying, however, I can foresee that 
some one may set the authentic quotation from 
Hamlet to the effect that "one may smile and 
smile, and be a villain." And so one may. But 
then one might as easily smile, and smile, and be 
a hero, and still have as little sense of humour 
as a sane man can have. For to be devoid of all 
sense of humour is to be mad. The simple truth 
seems to be that the humour sense has nothing 
whatever to do with a man's capacity for laugh- 
ter, or for making other people laugh. I dare say 
Dickens has caused as much mirth as any other 
author, and yet his sense of humour was curi- 
ously defective. It seems to have played hardly 
any part in his private life. Certainly, it did not 
save him from taking himself far too seriously at 
times, or from occasionallymaking himself rather 
absurd, as a fuller sense of humour would. He 
had exuberant animal spirits, and that fondness 
for practical joking and buffoonery which one 
usually associates with that least humorous of 
young animals, the schoolboy ; but he had not, 
as Thackeray had, that faculty of self-criticism 
and self-restraint, and that half-sad, half-whim- 
sical attitude toward life-in-the-large which be- 
tokens a richer and profounder sense of humour, 

334 



CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 

and which is, indeed, more rarely found in the 
professional funny man than in the man of the 
world. 

The humour sense is at once a stultifying and 
an enlarging sense. Its possession would have 
stultified Napoleon by enabling him to realise his 
physical insignificance and the magnificent fatuity 
of his ambitions. 1 1 would have helped the Little 
Corporal to see himself as his comrades saw him, 
and then he could not have gone on. Later, it 
would have forced him to consider, in their due 
proportions, the value of his victories as com- 
pared with the worthlessness of his crown. Fin- 
ally, after Elba, it would have saved him from 
St. Helena. But to such men as Shakespeare and 
Meredith — to cite the Alpha and Omega of Eng- 
lish philosophy — it was an enlarging sense in that 
it prevented them from ever becoming ridicu- 
lous in their quest after the sublime, and showed 
them how to be god-like without sloughing their 
humanity, how to be dignified without pompo- 
sity or bombast. 

Dickens' many limitations are mainly attribut- 
able to his lack of this saving sense; but then his 
many triumphs are due to his lack of it, too. 

My point is that because Dickens, until he ap- 
proached middle age, lacked that particular re- 
finement of the humour sense, he was always too 
much himself, he was always too much bound up 
335 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

in himself, to get outside himself and see himself 
as he really was. 

Thus, in the autobiography of David Copper- 
field, wherein he figures as David, he gives an 
ever less clear and convincing presentment of 
David as he finds David becoming more and 
more a contemporary of Charles Dickens. As 
child, boy, youth, and young man, David is ex- 
cellent. We know him. We believe in him. We 
recognise ourselves in him. And we love him. 
Then, somehow, David begins to fade into a 
mere shadow of his former self. He becomes 
rather like Dickens' other woodenly impossible 
heroes: like Harry Maylie, Nicholas Nickleby, 
Edward Haredale, and the rest. And as the flesh- 
and-blood reality of the child, the boy, the youth, 
the young man, melt away into the filmy inde- 
terminate outlines of the maturer David, we are 
sensible of losing all interest in him. The first 
part of David C opperfie Id mi^r^sis us because of 
David. The last part barely succeeds in interest- 
ing us in spite of him, as a moving record of the 
doings and sayings of other folk than David, 

Until Steerforth betrays Little Em'ly and dis- 
appears from the story, David is an ever fresh 
and diverting companion. After that, he becomes 
rather wearisome. We feel, somehow, that in the 
character of Steerforth, who, it is said, was found- 
ed on a certain George Stroughill, brother of 
Miss Lucy Stroughill, a winsome, golden-haired 

336 



CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 

maiden, who lived in the same street at Chatham 
in which the Dickens family lived when Charles 
was a tiny boy, whom Charles made childish love 
to, and who figures as Golden Lucy in The Wreck 
of the Golden Mary : in Steerforth we seem to 
feel that we have just that human heroic quality 
which David is so unnaturally deficient in. We 
are even fain to wonder whether, if David instead 
of Steerforth had betrayed Little Em'ly, weshould 
not have been more interested in him, have even 
loved him a little better for the passion and the 
sin, the rapture and the agony, which Dickens 
might have been inspired to describe instead of 
the pretty-prettinesses of Dora and the insipid 
domesticities of Agnes. 

But Dickens never would have been inspired 
to any such artistic purpose, because of just that 
lack of the saving sense of humour which con- 
strained him to gloze and sublimate the facts of 
life, and to idealise all men, even himself 

In Great Expectations he gives us again a pic- 
ture of himself as the love-lorn Pip ; and again he 
baulks himself on the verge of a grand passion, 
again he pauses upon the edge of a great gulf into 
which he might have flung himself, and so re- 
mained with us for ever in the glittering simili- 
tude of a fallen angel hurtling down from Heaven 
into Hell. (Even to suggest the image is to pro- 
voke a smile.) 

He might have done that . . . if he had been 
337 Y 



CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 

an altogether different type of man. But he was, 
emphatically, the type of man that would never 
dream of perpetrating romance in his own per- 
son. He was always acutely, nervously conscious 
that in David and in Pip he had revealed the 
child he used to be ; and that that child was 
henceforth himself, to be taken very seriously, 
very solemnly, to be kept apart and held invio- 
late from the common temptations, the sins and 
the lusts of the flesh, that poor average human- 
ity is heir to. Dickens' muse bore a strange like- 
ness to Mrs. Grundy. 

He was, however, far enough off from his 
childhood to tell us exactly what he was like as 
a child, what he, as a child, thought and felt and 
did and suffered. He was still far enough off from 
his boyhood to make David and Pip very human 
boys; and still not so close to his own youth as to 
be afraid to give a very accurate impression of 
the wild dreams and desires and aspirations and 
vain longings of youth. But he was a good deal 
too close to the young man he had been not so 
many years ago : he was still a young man when 
he ^xol^DavidCopperfield: to be too frank about 
that part of his life. He seizes on its humours, its 
comic misgivings and doubts and ecstasies, and 
makes the most of them and the best of them, in 
default of anything better. 

Then . . . the young man is himself, Charles 
Dickens ; and he veils himself in mystery. 
338 



THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 

A change took place in Dickens after he had 
written David Copperfield. I have a suspicion 
that David Copperfield introduced him to him- 
self. Anyway, in all his later books he is far more 
worldly-wise. He seems to be developing a per- 
sonal sense of humour at last. There is more 
light and shade in his later character-drawing. 
William Dorrit,the Father of the Marshalsea, for 
instance, always seems to me to present a far more 
likely portrait of his own father, John Dickens, 
than Micawber — though I infinitely prefer Mi- 
ca wber, of course. But all his characters, with a 
few noble exceptions, are more probable. And 
this (I believe) because Dickens had come to a 
better understanding of himself, had sunk a little 
of the magician in the man of the world ; and so 
set up a new standard by which 
to judge his fellow-men. 



INDEX 



Y2 



i 



I 



INDEX 



Agnes, 68, 74. 
Ainsworth, Harrison, 130. 
All the Year Round, 324. 
Arabin, 93- 

Artful Dodger, 19, 128, 239, 240, 
250. 

Bagstock, Major, 328. 

Barnaby Kudge, 33, 186, 203, 207, 

211, 213, 219, 220, 224. 
Barrie, J. M., 8, 147, 237. 
Bastille, 11. 
Bates, Charley, 251. 
Beadnell, Maria, 25, 28, 29, 31, t^i, 

36,42,43. 44.45. 46, 52. 
Bennett, Arnold, 237. 
Blackmore, Mr. (of Blackmore & 

Ellis), 114, 140. 
Blimbers, The, 2Q0. 
Bleak House, 3, 7, 75. 253. 3o8, 

329- 
Boffin, Mr., 279, 280, 281. 
Bompas, Serjeant, 93. 
Boot, Alfred, 131. 
Borough, 160. 
Bounderby, 1 37. 
Boythorn, 7, 19, 328, 330. 
Brass, Sally, 7. 
Sampson, 7. 
Bray, Madeline, 24, 68. 
Bronte, Charlotte, 190. 
Brougham, Lord, 97, 98. 
Browdie, John, 137, 142. 
Browne, HablotK., 103,261, 291. 
Brownlow, Mr., in, 112, 113. 
Bucket, Inspector, 307, 308. 
Budden, James, 97. 
Bumble, 124. 
Burnett, Henry, 76, 78, 79, 193, 

292 
Buzfuz, Serjeant, 93, 95. 
Byron, Lord, 327. 

Caine, Hall, 108. 

Camden Town, 160, 161, 173, 174. 
Campbell, Mrs., 291, 292. 
Carker, 7, 68, 279, 280. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 102, 168, 188, 
201, 202, 208, 214, 218, 219. 
Carton, Sydney, 209, 268. 
Casby, 46. 

343 



Chadband, Rev., 225, 268. 
Chapman & Hall, Messrs., 83, 84. 

Thomas, 290, 291. 
Chatham, 159, 161, 172, 173, 174- 
Cheeryble, Bros., 128, 129, 130, 

131, 132, 136. 
Chester, Edward, 24, 25, 16. 

Sir John, 208, 228, 230, 231. 
Chesterfield, Lord, 208, 228, 229, 

230, 231, 232. 
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 199, 200, 

201, 202. 
Chevalier, Albert, 238. 
Child s History of England, A, 199, 

200, 202. 
Chimes, The, 313. 
Chivery, Young Mr., 19. 
Christ vias Carol, The, 317. 
Chuzzlewit, Jonas, 263. 
Chuzzlewit, Martin, 25, 271, 273, 

Clare, Ada, 68, 75. 

Claypole, Noah, 128. 

Clennam, Arthur, 46, 48. 

Collins, Wilkie, 209. 

Cook, Lady. See Mrs. Leo Hunter. 

Cooper, Mrs. Mary Ann, 162, 163. 

Copperjield, David. See David 

Copperfield. 
Corelli, Marie, 108. 
Corney, Mrs., 124. 
Cornwall, Barry, 261. 
Creakle, Mr., 177- 
Crockett, W. S., 19. 
Cruncher, Jerry, 209. 
Cute, Alderman, 313. 

Darlle, Rosa, 297. 

David, " the apoplectic butler," 131. 

David Copperfield, 3,6, 30, 31, 32, 

36, 74,79, 158,175,176,177, 

186, 191, 294, 296, 333, 335, 

336. 
Darwin, 281. 

Defarges, The, 207, 217, 218. 
Dennis the Hangman, 207, 209, 220. 
Dickens, Fanny, 76, 78, I59, 183, 

192, 193, 194- 
John,i34, 159, 167, 171,172,173. 

176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 

182,183, 185, 339. 



INDEX 



Dickens, Mrs. John, 174, 175, 185, 
186. 

Mrs. Charles (n^e Miss Ho- 
garth), 142. 
Dickensian, The, 267. 
Dodd, Mr., 280. 

Dodger, Artful. See Artful Dodger. 
Dodson & Fogg, 114. 
Dolly Varden, 34, 35- S*^, 54- 
Dombey ^ Son, 63, 292. 
Dombey, Edith, 292. 

Florence, 24, 68. 

Mr., 290, 291. 
Dora, 31, 33, 36,37.38,39,40,41, 

42, 54. 
Dorrit, Little. See Little Dorrit. 

William, 339. 
Dotheboys Hall, 103, 104, 108 
Dowler, 96. 

Drood, Edwin, 25, 298, 304. 
Drummond, Miss Rose Emma, 142. 
Dumas, Alexandre, 147, 148, 

Edinburgh, 4. 

Edinburgh Review, 305. 

Edwin Drood. See Drood, Edwin. 

Eliot, George, 190, 

Elliott, Rev. Hume, 131. 

Ellis, Mr. (of Messrs. Blackmore & 

Ellis), 96, 140. 
Emerson, 334. 

Em'ly, Little. See Little Em'ly. 
Estella, 51, 52, 53. 
Evefard, Dr., 290. 

Fagin, 7, 125, 239, 240, 241, 246, 
247, 249,251,252, 263. 
Bob, 191. 
Fang, Mr., 109, no, ili, 112, 

113- 
Fat Boy, The, 97, 126. 
Field, Inspector, 308. 
Fields, James T., 306. 
Fitzgerald, Percy, 72, 94, 132, 135, 

274, 282, 283, 294, 322. 
Fleet Prison, 239. 
Flora, 33, 46, 47, 48, 49. 
rorster,John, 5,31,78,84, 96, loi, 

130, 160, 161, 174, 193, 261, 

291, 295, 298, 299,313, 316, 

317, 322, 323, 327. 
Foster, John, 84. 



Foulon, 207, 209, 213, 214, 215, 

216, 218. 
French Revolution, The, 201, 202, 

208, 218. 

Gadshill, 208. 

Galsworthy, John, 273. 

Gamfield, 124. 

Gamp, Mrs. Sairey, 268, 271, 272. 

273. 
Garlands, The, 71, 161. 
Gashford, 226, 227. 
Gay, Walter, 24, 25, 76. • 

Gazalee, Mr. Justice, 95. 
Golden Lucy, 337. 
Golden Mary, The Wreck of the, HJ. 
Gordon, Lord George, 207,209, 213, 

220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227. 
Gradgrind, 137. 
Graham, Mary, 68. 
Grant, Brothers, 130, 131, 132, 133, 

134, 13s, 136, 137- 
Great Expectations, 51, 89, 337. 
Gridley, 308. 

Griffiths, Major Arthur, 241, 246. 
Grimaldi, Life of, 85. 
Grip the Raven, 209, 211. 
Grueby, John, 226. 

Hall, Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Carter, 

274. 
Hard Times, 3. 
Hardy, Thomas, 273. 
Haredale, Emma, 24, 68. 
Harmon, John, 25, 55. 
Harvey, Martin, 268. 
Hayes, Mrs., 292. 
Hazlitt, William, 261. 
Heep, Uriah, 7. 
Hexams, The, 299, 300. 
Hill, Mrs. Seymour, 295. 
History of Our Own Times, A, gy, 

276. 
Hogarth, Georgina, 74. 

Mary, 59, 60. 61 , 62, 63, 64, 65, 

67. 71- 73- 74. 75- 

Mr., 60. 

Mrs., 59, 60, 62. 
Hood, Tom, 313. 
Hopkins, Captain, 176. 
Hortense, Mademoiselle, 253. 
Howler, Rev. Mclchizedec, 225. 

344 



INDEX 



Hugh of the "Maypole," 207. 
Humphrey, Master, 287, 289. 
Hunt, Leigh, 6, 19, 313, 32?, 324, 

325- 
Hunter, Mrs. Leo, 96. 
Hunted Down, 259, 262. 

James, Edwin, 210. 

Jarley, Mrs., 152, 154, 155. 

Jarndyce, Mr., 293. 

Jasper, John, 306. 

Jellyby, Mrs., 314. 

Jennings or Jennens, Mr., 292, 293, 

294, 309. 
Jo, Poor, 268. 
Johnson, Dr., 185, 323. 
Jones, William, 177. 
Jorgan, Captain, 292. 

Kenwigs, The, 239. 

Kit, 7i- 

Kitton, F. G., Mr,, 85, 130, 143, 

173. 293- 
Knott, Newman, 140, 152. 
Kolle, Henry, 29, 43, 44, 45. 
Krook, 14. 

La Creevy, Miss, 137, 141, 142. 

Laing, Mr., no, 113. 

Lamb, Charles, 261. 

Lamert, Dr., 96. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 19, 313, 

326, 327, 328, 329, 330. 
Lant Street. See Borough. 
Lascar Sal, 306, 309. 
Lauder, Harry, 237, 238. 
Lawrie, Sir Peter, 313. 
Lee, Miss Jenny, 268. 
Leno, Dan, 268, 269. 
Lewes, George Henry, 190. 
Limbkins, Mr., 124. 
Little Dorrit, 3, 46, 51, 162, 163, 

164, 307. 
Little Em'ly, 336. 
Little Nell, 68, 73, 74. 
Littlefair. See Hayes. 
Linkinwater, Tim, 141. 
Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 91. 
Longfellow, 88. 

Lucas, (" Mad ") James, 300, 309. 
Lytton, Bulwer, 90, 208, 261. 

345 



McCarthy, Justin, 97, 276, 
Maclise, 5. 
Macready, 261. 
Manette, Lucy, 68, 75. 
Mannings, The, 253, 254, 255, 

256, 257, 258, 259. 
Marshalsea, The, 160, 162, 175, 

177, 191,239, 339- 
Marchioness, The, 161, 162. 
Martin Chuzzlewit. See Chuzzle- 

wit, Martin. 
Maude, Cyril, 268. 
Martineau, Harriet, 313, 314. 
Maylie, Harry, 24, 76. 336. 

Rose, 24, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74. 
Mealy Potatoes, 191. 
Mercier, 208, 218. 
Merdle, Mr., 137. 
Meredith, George, 273, 335. 
Micawber, Mr., 7, 18, 19, 134, 

167, 181, 182, 326, 339. 
MoUoy, Mr., 114, 177. 
Moncitton, Hon. Miss. See Mrs. 

Leo Hunter, and Lady Cook. 
Moore, George, 237. 
Mopes the Hermit, 300, 301, 302, 

303,305- 
Morgan, Captain, 292. 
Morning Herald, 178. 
Mowcher, Miss, 294, 296. 

Nancy, 23, 126, 128. 

Napoleon, 327, 335. 

Nell, Little. See Little Nell. 

Newgate, 1 1 . 

Nickleby, Kate, 28,68, 139, 140. 

Mrs., 19. 167, 185, l86, 187. 
Nickleby, Nicholas, 2^, 76, 103, 

104, 105, 108, !o9, 128, 130, 

133. 137, 142, 147, 186, 239, 

252, 277, 292, 336. 
Nickleby, Ralph, 26. 
Noggs, Newman, 137, 138, I39. 

140, 141, 151, 152. 
Nordau, Max, 168. 

Old Curiosity Shop, The, 73, 148, 
152, 161, 162, 225, 287, 

Oliver Twist, 59, 109, no, 123, 
124, 125, 126, 128, 238, 239, 
240, 246, 248, 252, 268. 

Only Way, The, 268. 



INDEX 



Our Mtitual Friend, 54, 280, 299. 

Peace, Charles, 246. 

Pecksniff, 7, 17, 274, 275, 277, 
278, 279. 

Peel, Sir Robert, 274, 275, 276. 

Peggotty, 279. 

Pendennis, 156. 

Perker, Mr. , 96. 

Phiz. See Browne, Hablol K. 

Pickwick, Mr., 83, 84, 85, 91, 92. 

Pickwick Papers, 3, 59, 85, 88, 89, 
91. 93. 96, 97, loi. 103, 124, 
178. 203, 205, 206, 225, 238, 

317. 
Pinch. Tom, 18, 76. 
Pip, 51, 52, 53, 334, 337. 
Pipchin, Mrs., 191, 279. 
Podsnaps, The, 319, 320, 321, 322, 

323- 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 190. 
Porter, Captain, 176, 191. 
Portsmouth, 172. 
Pott, Mr., 97,98. 
Powell, Thomas, 182. 
Prig, Betsy, 271, 272. 
Procter, Bryan Waller. See Barry 

Cornwall. 

Quilp, 7, 18, 23, 263. 

Reprinted Pieces, 307. 
Rochester, 105. 
Rokesmith, John, 25. 
Roylance, Mrs. See Pipchin, Mrs. 
Rousseau, 208, 218. 
Rudge, Barnaby. See Barnaby 
Rudge. 

Sadleir, John. 6'£^ Merdle. 

Sal, Lascar. See Lascar Sal. 

Salem House, 177. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 19, 87. 

Seymour, 83, 84. 

Shakespeare, 3, 17, 90, 267, 333. 

Shaw, William, 103, 104, 105, 106, 

107, 108. 
Shelley, 327. 

Sherlock Holmes, 18, 308. 
Sikes, Bill, 23, 125, 126, 239, 240. 
Sketches by Boz, 83. 
Skewton, Mrs. ("Cleopatra"), 291. 



Skimpin, Serjeant, 93. 
Skimpole, 7, 18, 19, 324, 328. 
Slammer, Dr., 96. 
Slinkton, Julius, 253, 259, 263. 
Slum, Mr., 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 

162. 
Smike, 137, 142, 143. 
Smith, Sydney, 137. 
Snubbin, Serjeant, 93, 94. 
Solomons, Ikey, 125, 241, 242, 243, 

244, 245, 246, 251. 
Sowerberry, Mr., 124. 
Squeers, 7, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 

108, 125, 128. 
Stareleigh, Mr. Justice, 95, 96. 
Steerforth, 294, 295, 318, 336, 337. 
Sterry, J. Ashby, 293. 
Stiggins, 225. 
Strachey, J. St. Loe, 151. 
Strong, Miss, 292, 293, 309. 
Stroughill, George, 336. 

Lucy, 336. 
Stryver, 209, 210, 211. 
Swiveller, Dick, 151, 152. 

Tale of Two Cities, A, 26, 51, 75, 
203, 207, 208, 210, 213. 

Talfourd, Judge, 3i3> 3i5, 3i6, 317, 
318. 

Tapley, Mark, 18. 

Tappertit, Sim, 34, 207. 

Thackeray, 189, 190, 334. 

Tom Tiddler's Ground, 300, 301, 
302. 

Toodle, Polly, 292. 

Traddles, Tommy, 315, 318. 

Tree, Sir Herbert, 268. 

Trotwood, Betsy, 293. 

Tulkinghorn, Mr., 114. 

Twemlow, Mr., 319. 

Vale, Sam, 86, 87, 88,91. 
Varden, Dolly. See Dolly Varden. 
Veneerings, The, 137, 319. 
Venus, Mr., 280, 282. 

Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 259, 

260, 261. 
Waller, Mick, 191. 
Wardle, Mrs., 126. 
Waterton, Mr., 211. 
Wegg, Silas, 280, 281, 282. 



VVeller, Mary, 87, 279. 

Sam, 18, 87, 91, 92, 206. 

Tony, 91, 92, 93. 
Wield, Detective, 307. 
Wilfer, Bella, 55. 
Wilkins, 93. 
Willett, Joe, 34, 35, 36. 
Williams, Bransby, 26S. 
Willis, J., 282, 309. 



INDEX 



Wilmot, Charles, 268. 
Winkle, Mr., 84. 

Winter, Mrs. Henry. See Maria 
Beadnell. 

Yates, Edmund, 210. 

Zangwill, Israel, 168. 
Zola, 273. 



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